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H Tager-Flusberg

Publications and source records attributed to H Tager-Flusberg.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1990

A longitudinal study of language acquisition in autistic and Down syndrome children.

Findings from a longitudinal study of language acquisition in a group of autistic children are presented. Six autistic subjects and six children with Down syndrome, matched on age and MLU at the start of the study, were followed over a period of between 12 and 26 months. Language samples were collected in the children's homes while they interacted with their mothers. Samples of 100 spontaneous child utterances from the transcripts were analyzed using the following measures: MLU, Index of Productive Syntax, lexical diversity, and form class distribution. The results indicate that the majority of these autistic children followed the same general developmental path as the Down syndrome children in this study, and normal children reported in the literature, in the acquisition of grammatical and lexical aspects of language, and confirm previous findings suggesting that autism does not involve a fundamental impairment in formal aspects of language.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1990

Does imitation facilitate the acquisition of grammar? Evidence from a study of autistic, Down's syndrome and normal children.

This paper re-opens the question of whether imitation plays a significant role in the acquisition of grammar. Data for this study came from four samples of naturalistic mother-child speech taken over the course of one year from four autistic, four Down's syndrome and four normal children, covering a range of MLU stages. In general, autistic children used more formulaic language, including imitations, than Down's syndrome children, who in turn used more than the normal children. Comparisons of imitative and spontaneous corpora from the same transcripts were made using MLU and the Index of Productive Syntax. The main findings were that, with few exceptions, spontaneous speech utterances were longer, and contained more advanced grammatical construction than did the imitation utterances. These findings held across all three groups of subjects. We conclude that imitation does not facilitate grammatical development.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1985

Basic level and superordinate level categorization by autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children.

Three experiments designed to test autistic children's nonverbal and verbal categorization abilities are reported in this paper. In the first two experiments, 14 autistic children were compared to 14 retarded and 14 normal children matched on verbal mental age. Their ability to categorize pictures from basic level categories and from biological and artifactual superordinate level categories was assessed using a matching-to-sample procedure. The three groups of subjects were similar in their performance. Basic level categorization was easier than more abstract categorization, and for all three groups, prototypicality played a role in categorizing superordinate level concepts; that is, children in all three groups made more errors categorizing peripheral examples. In the third experiment, a subgroup of 7 autistic children showed evidence that their lexicons were well organized and that they appreciated the meaning relationships among words at the superordinate level. These findings suggest that autistic children do not suffer a specific cognitive deficit in the ability to categorize and form abstract concepts, as has been previously suggested in the literature.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1985

The conceptual basis for referential word meaning in children with autism.

The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of the representation of substantive word meanings in children with autism. The subjects included 3 groups of autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children, who were matched on verbal mental age. The subjects participated in 2 experiments investigating their comprehension of words for basic level and superordinate level categories. The 3 groups were equivalent in their performance in both experiments. They also showed the same patterns of overextension and underextension errors that were related to a prototype representation of the underlying concepts. These findings suggest that semantic knowledge for concrete objects is represented and organized in similar ways in autistic, retarded, and normal children and that previous findings on cognitive deficits in autistic children are more likely related to their inability to use cognitive representations in an appropriate and flexible manner.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1981

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.

Adolescent↗