Defense Date
7-16-2010
Graduation Date
Summer 2010
Availability
Immediate Access
Submission Type
thesis
Degree Name
MS
Department
Speech-Language Pathology (SLP)
School
Rangos School of Health Sciences
Committee Chair
Diane Williams
Committee Member
David Somers
Committee Member
Heather Rusiewicz
Keywords
autism, language, linguistic processing, narratives
Abstract
A current model of autism proposes that it is a disorder of information processing. The purpose of this study was to compare the language production of adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) to that of age and Verbal IQ-matched controls with respect to speech disruptions and formulaic expressions, features which indicate linguistic processing challenges. Standard language measures and language samples from the ADOS Telling a Story from a Book and Create a Story tasks were collected and analyzed. No between-group measures were found to be statistically significant. However, 10 of 16 individuals with HFA exhibited speech disruptions consistent with clinically "tangled" speech. A number of the individuals with HFA used idiosyncratic versions of formulaic expressions consistent with an underlying difference in language acquisition. The findings suggest that some individuals with HFA may have greater difficulty with linguistic processing than others consistent with proposals from previous research on language subgroups in autism.
Format
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Belardi, K. (2010). Indicators of Linguistic Processing Constraints in the Narratives of Individuals with High-Functioning Autism (Master's thesis, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/265