engleski

Longitudinal Samples of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Acquiring Croatian: Insights

Language acquisition varies across the autism spectrum (ASD). While the core features of language have historically been described as relatively intact, the ability to appropriately use language shows constant impairments (Tager- Flusberg 2006). Language knowledge in population with ASD is typically assessed through language testing or language tasks, while language sampling is not that well documented. However, the studies researching the relationship of test results and measures of spontaneous spoken language show correlations between these two types of measures (overview: Condouris et al, 2003). Apart for measures of spoken language, language samples analysis provides the opportunity for qualitative research. The goal of this research was to use measures of spoken language and error analysis to examine the language of two participants with ASD. Additionally, we wanted to establish the error classification suitable for morphologically rich Croatian language. Method Individual speech and language therapy sessions of two Croatian speaking five-year-old ASD+MSD participants (uneven developmental profiles, ≥1.5 SD below the mean on language tests) were recorded during a five-month period (40 sessions). Speech samples were transcribed in CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). The errors were classified by type, part of speech, and grammatical category. Basic measures (mean length of utterance, mean length of turn, vocabulary diversity) were calculated per sample. Results Both participants displayed both low results on language tests (≥1.5 SD below the mean), low results on language measures when compared with peers of same chronological age and high percentage of errors (10% to 12% of erroneous tokens). Qualitative analysis showed large array of errors, from phonological to semantic. However, most of the errors were morphological, morphosyntactic and syntactic errors (together they account for almost 80% of errors). Conclusion All results suggest that participants display symptoms of morphosintactic deficits. Although it is typically assumed that the formal features of language are not core deficits of ASD, contemporary research is trying to define language subtypes in ASD. Namely, part of the ASD population show performance consistent with morphosyntactic deficits (Walenski et al. 2014). This group is often referred as an ALI (children with ASD & language impairment).

ASD, language development, language impairment

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