Communicative profiles of preschool children with handicaps: implications for early identification

The purpose of this study was to compare the communicative profiles of preschool children with handicaps to those of normal children functioning in the prelinguistic and one-word stage using standard sampling procedures. The children with handicaps included 4 with Down syndrome, 4 with specific language impairments, and 3 with autism. Measures obtained from the communication samples included rates of intentional communication and proportions of communicative functions, discourse structure, communicative means, and syllabic shape. The results of the children with Down syndrome fell within the normal range on all parameters. The common pattern displayed by the children with specific language impairments was a deviation in syllabic shape. The children with autism displayed adequate rates of communicating but fell outside of the normal range for their language stage on the other communicative parameters. Clinical implications of these findings for the early identification of children with communicative impairments are discussed.