Developmental Process of Communicative Functoins and Remedial Education in an Autistic Child (1)

Many researchers and clinicians have pointed out that one of the major deficits in autistic children is in the area of communication. Communication deficits are a central symptom of the autism syndorome. Communication problems seem to be intertwined with the social and cognitive difficulties that also characterize the autism syndorome. The acquisition of communication ability is one of the most important practical problems in the education for autistic children. This study is one of a series of studies attempting to clarify the communication problems and to seek for the appropriate educational care in autistic children. In the present research, we attempted to analyze the developmental problems from the prelinguistic to the linguistic communicative functions of one autistic child in relation to the other functions such as cognitive development and behavioral problem. The subject was an 8-year-old autistic boy. We are training this boy from his 2 years 9 months in our class of remedial education for handicapped children. In analyzing his developmental process of communicative functions for two years (2 years 9 months to 4 years 7 months old), three stages were divided from the prelinguistic to the linguistic communication. The results indicated that his communicative skills become more complex with the progress of the cognitive development, but that he has still difficulties in the prelinguistic communicative abilities such as "joint attention and "declarative performance". On the basis of these results, we discussed the problem of communicative function in autistic children from the viewpoint of the development of pragmatic communicative functions. Various ways of educational care for autistic children must be sought after through grasping the meaning or background of the problems in their developmental process of communicative functions