Pragmatic, lexical and grammatical abilities of autistic spectrum children

Development of grammatical, functional and lexical aspects in the language of children with autism spectrum disorders.

To analyze the development of grammatical, functional and lexical aspects in three different moments: initial assessment, after six and twelve months of language therapy.

Participants of this study were ten boys with ages between 2:7 and 11:2 years, with psychiatric diagnosis within the autistic spectrum. Video recorded samples of a 30 minutes patient-therapist interaction were recorded in three different moments (therapy onset, after six and twelve months of therapy) for each subject. The first 15 minutes of each sample was transcribed for the analysis of the functional communicative profile. Grammatical and lexical aspects were analyzed through the transcription of 100 speech segments of each sample. All data were longitudinally compared within and between areas.

There were significant associations between the studied variables but no statistically significant differences along the studied period of language therapy.

There are associations between grammatical and pragmatic performances.