Summary
Early childhood autism is a syndrome which appears during the first 30 months of life and is typified by a severe disturbance in language development, among other behavioural abnormalities. Since no systematic linguistic investigation of autistic children is available, an investigation of the phonological characteristics often autistic children was carried out, in the areas of both production and perception of speech sounds. In order to investigate the possibility of atypical phonological characteristics in this group, they were compared with normal and mentally retarded children matched on a nonlinguistic test of mental age.
The results suggest that the autistic group shows a delayed pattern of acquisition of phonological characteristics similar to that found in the mentally retarded group.