An Analysis of the Development of Communicative Skills and Grammar in Three Korean Children with Autism

한국 고기능 자폐아동의 담화화용과 문법 능력의 상호 관계에 관한 분석 연구

The present paper is concerned with assessing both communicational skills and grammatical knowledge in three Korean-speaking children with a range in age from 9;11 to 12;2 and in MLU from 1.68 to 2.22. It was found that all three autistic children's speech was largely repetitive and echolalic, unable to consistently interact communicatively on the ongoing joint focus of attention. It was also observed that the more repetitive the child speech was, the more impaired morpho-syntactically it was. Based on these findings, it was speculated that the deficit in joint focus of attention might relate to grammatical development.