An Investigation of Language Impairment in Persian-Speaking Autistic Children

Abnormalities of language and other forms of communication are among the significant characteristics of autistic children. The goal of the present research is to investigate and compare linguistic properties of Persian-speaking autistic children with their normal counterparts. To this aim, 10 autistic children with age 3-6 years were compared with 10 typically developing children matched on non-verbal IQ and gender. In a 30 minutes free-play session, the speech of each child was recorded and then was analyzed for the phonetic, phonological and morpho-syntactic properties. The findings of the present research showed that there was a statistically significant difference between autistic and normal children in consonant deletion, consonant substitution, the use of stress on inappropriate syllable, atypical intonation, incorrect use of grammatical tense, incorrect use of preposition, inappropriate use of plural nouns and the use of complex sentences (p0/05), While their differences were not statistically significant in sound epenthesis, metathesis, subject-verb agreement, having difficulty with making the verbs negative, and using demonstratives (p0/05). The results of this research showed that autistic children in compare to normal ones have more problems in phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic features of speech. Therefore, appropriate treatment programs are required to tackle these problems.