Comprehension of verbal terms for emotions in normal, autistic, and schizophrenic children

Abstract

The abilities of autistic and schizophrenic children to recognize the meanings of concrete nouns, nonemotional (neutral) adjectives, and emotional adjectives were compared to a normal control (NC) group using a picture‐matching task. Autistic children performed significantly worse than chronological‐age‐matched normal and schizophrenic children on emotional adjectives but did not differ in their abilities to recognize the meanings of nouns and neutral adjectives. Schizophrenic children did not differ from normal children in any of the three tasks. When matched on mental age, autistic and normal groups did not differ significantly. In a descriptive analysis of definitions, verbal responses from autistic children were found to be more like those of younger normal children. Considered together, these results suggest that abnormal performance on adjectives can be attributed to language delay rather than to specific autistic features. When parents, autism experts, and speech/language pathologists evaluated definitions of emotional adjectives produced by autistic and normal children, all three rater groups were able to distinguish between responses from the two groups.