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Language disabilities in infantile autism: A brief review and comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz*
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
*
Steven Schwartz, Department of Psychology, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, Qld 4067, Australia
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Abstract

Experimental studies of autistic children's memory for linguistic materials have yielded what appear to be conflicting results. A review of these studies reveals a pattern of findings consistent with the hypothesis that autistics do, in fact, have a special linguistic coding difficulty. The apparent discrepancies are the result of the use of low-power statistical tests in some experiments. Because the autistic deficit may arise from a failure to use semantic or syntactic knowledge or even from a failure to acquire such knowledge in the first place, future research should be aimed at explicating the precise mechanisms underlying the autistic deficit.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , February 1981 , pp. 25 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

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