Form, Content, and Function of the Spontaneous Communication of Autistic Students

Abstract

The purposes of the present study were (1) to explore interactions among various aspects of communicative and cognitive skills in students with autism and (2) to examine the extent to which autistic children are similar to normal children in communicative development. Spontaneous communication samples were recorded for 17 autistic students ranging in age from 4.2 to 21.1 years. Six students, all nonverbal, were found to communicate spontaneously at extremely low rates. For the remaining eleven students, significant intercorrelations were found among measures of several dimensions of communication: mean length of utterance (MLU), communicative rate, number of different communicative functions expressed, and number of different semantic categories used. Acquisition patterns for semantic categories were found to be similar to those reported for normal children, but this was not the case for commmunicative functions. In both the semantic and pragmatic dimensions, autistic students appeared to be restricted in their communication compared to normal children with similar syntactic skills. The implications of the data for cognitive/linguistic versus motivational differences in autistic persons and their implications for assessment and treatment are discussed.