1. Aylin Küntay Meeting 6 Language and Communication Disorders
Autistic Disorder
Aylin Küntay
Meeting 6
Language and Communication Disorders

2. What is autism? Pervasive developmental disorder
Impairment of the reciprocal social and communication skills
Abnormal language development
Restricted repertoire of behaviors and interests
Historically though to be caused by non-warm, unresponsive parenting
No evidence

3. Early diagnosis ( < 2)
Looking at faces
Following someone’s gaze
Turning when name called
Showing objects to others
Protodeclarative gestures
Pointing at interesting objects
Pointing to request
Protoimperative gestures
Symbolic play

4. Social abilities No differences in attachment
İmpaired social imitation
Impaired joint attention
Face-processing problems
Emotion perception and expression??
Symbolic play
Delayed
Mechanical and repetitive

5. Language and communication abilities
Joint attention and symbolic play are considered precursors of lang
Around 50% of autistic individuals do not produce speech at all
Rest produce deviant language
Echolalia (immediate or delayed repetition)
Abnormal prosody
Pronoun reversal (use “you” instead of “I”)

6. Especially in pragmatic aspects
No relevance: provision of redundant details
Inappropriate shifts to a new topic
Lack of responsiveness to others’ questions and comments
Lack of understanding of speaker-listener turn taking rules
Lack of understanding of the listener’s perspective

7. Repetitive behaviors and interests
Lower level motor behaviors such as shaking, hand waving
Higher level behaviors such as over-organizing; obsessive interests

8. Assessment and screening instruments
ADOS (Autism Diagnostic Observation Scale)
CARS (Childhood Autism Rating Scale)

9. Asperger syndrome
Without mental retardation or significant language delay
Being unable to understand and respond to social cues
Later:

10. Autism Joint attention episodes absent; impaired pragmatics
No declarative speech acts
ToM difficulties
OK lexical learning in high-functioning