On the nature of linguistic functioning in early infantile autism

This paper provides a review of studies conducted on linguistic functioning in autistic children, within the framework developed in normal language acquisition research. Despite certain methodological weaknesses, the research consistently shows that phonological and syntactic development follow the same course as in normal children and in other disordered groups, though at a slowed rate, while semantic and pragmatic functioning may be specially deficient in autism. These findings are related to other recent studies on the relative independence of different aspects of language.