Language patterns of adolescent autistics.

The language samples of seven verbal autistic adolescents were analyzed. Linguistic deficits were compared to characteristics reported for preteen autistics and described structurally. Only four subjects demonstrated linguistic impairments. These clustered primarily in the area of prosodic features, semantic cooccurrence constraints and general disfluency. No such clustering had been reported for the preteen population. No correlation between linguistic deficits, IQ, and age was found. However, performance on the Seashore Test for Musical Ability correlated highly with linguistic performance. Results suggest that (a) autism includes liguistically, and possibly etiologically, distinct subtroups; (b) the basic linguistic deficits in autism may be more specific than thought previously; and (c) perception of prosodic features may be crucial for decoding and encoding linguistic signals. Autistic children may be lacking in this ability.