The communicative use of pointing in autism: developmental profile and factors related to change.

PURPOSE: To describe different longitudinal profiles in communicative abilities and symptoms severity in early autism. METHODS: Five children with autism, aged from 3;3 to 4;10 years at baseline, were tested for production and comprehension of imperative and declarative pointing at about 4-month intervals. Concurrently with these sessions, children were evaluated in terms of cognitive and communicative abilities, and symptoms severity. RESULTS: Four subjects showed a mild to severe retardation in communicative and linguistic abilities. For production, all children exhibited the imperative pointing and only one the declarative pointing. For comprehension, two subjects showed the same profile as in production ('only imperative' and 'first imperative-later declarative', respectively). One child did not show any clear comprehension of the pointing gestures produced by the experimenter, and one child was able to understand both pointing in the same session. Childhood autism rating scale (CARS) global scores tended to decrease across sessions for all subjects and different individual profiles were identified. DISCUSSION: Declarative or experience-sharing pointing emerged later in one child only; it remained absent in four children as production, and in two children as comprehension. A preliminary conclusion based on CARS rating, is that autism involves a symptomatology that may decrease across time even if children differ in the decreasing profile relative to specific scores.

Developmental profile and regression in a child with autism: a single case study.

The developmental profile of a child with autism during the first 3 years of life is presented. Clinical material obtained from different sources is discussed: home videos from birth to 3 years, and cognitive and communicative evaluations at 24, 34 and 38 months. The videos show how the child appeared to make progress up to 12 months, but from 12 to 18 months some abilities that had been previously acquired were lost, and a decrease in social interaction, communication and language was observed. From 18 to 38 months communicative and linguistic abilities remained unchanged, but social interactive behaviours continued to decrease. The particular profile identified is discussed as one of the possible pathways through which autism may develop.

Noun versus verb emphasis in Italian mother-to-child speech.

This paper examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech produced by 15 Italian middle-class mothers to determine which specific patterns characterize linguistic input to children at 1;4 and 1;8. Since Italian is a pro-drop language, we expect that adult-to-child speech will show a bias towards a more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns. We expect that verbs will more likely occupy the sentence-initial position, and have more morphological inflections relative to nouns. Mother-to-child speech was coded for type and token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs. The results confirm our predictions. Namely, Italian-speaking mothers produced verb types and tokens more frequently than noun types and tokens, they placed verbs more frequently than nouns in salient utterance position, and they morphologically marked verb stems more than noun stems.