Applying psycholinguistic concepts to the treatment of an autistic child

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper describes a language program designed to allow an autistic 4-year-old child to acquire, in a near simultaneous manner, skill across a variety of sentence types. The training, which was focused on teaching the combinatorial and semantic properties of grammatical morphemes, resulted in the child's developing and using sentences whereas he had previously been limited to single words and rote phrases. The improvement occurred across a variety of settings and encompassed both elicited and spontaneous language. As expected from the autistic syndrome, those areas of language functioning requiring social skill (e.g., sustained dialogue) showed continued deficits.