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Applying psycholinguistic concepts to the treatment of an autistic child

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Marion Blank  and
Janet Milewski
Marion Blank*
Affiliation:
College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Rutgers Medical School
Janet Milewski
Affiliation:
College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Rutgers Medical School
*
Dr. Marion Blank, Department of Psychiatry, Rutgers Medical School, Piscataway, NJ 08854
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Abstract

This paper describes a language program designed to allow an autistic 4-year-old child to acquire, in a near simultaneous manner, skill across a variety of sentence types. The training, which was focused on teaching the combinatorial and semantic properties of grammatical morphemes, resulted in the child's developing and using sentences whereas he had previously been limited to single words and rote phrases. The improvement occurred across a variety of settings and encompassed both elicited and spontaneous language. As expected from the autistic syndrome, those areas of language functioning requiring social skill (e.g., sustained dialogue) showed continued deficits.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , February 1981 , pp. 65 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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