A Longitudinal Study Of Word Class Development In Autistic Children During Parent-child Interactions

As to autistic children, vocabulary development plays an important role in reflecting their language abilities. However, it has been very little researched and hasn't reached an overall and convergent conclusion. Due to the application of Chinese MOR program, the analysis can be conducted to show the information about each word class without the time-consuming manual counting, which really helps the researcher get a clear picture of vocabulary development.During this longitudinal study, six autistic children were followed and their parent-child free-play interaction processes were video-taped over a year. Each dyadic was video-taped once a month and there are 72 language samples in total. In order to find the developing tendency, the common features, the individual differences and the developing difficulties, the qualitative analysis was conducted on the whole vocabulary, the number of word types in each word class and the distribution of each word class etc., and the quantitative analysis was conducted on the specific mistakes in word using.The results indicate that: 1) The high function autistic children follow the same general developmental path as the normal children. Their vocabulary increase when they grow; their word class distribution is stable; their individual differences are relatively obvious; they have difficulties in specific word class and words using, but some of which can be relieved by intervention. 2) The low autistic children have severe and significant delay in the whole word-class development; their word types are limited and word class distribution is unstable; their expressive language often appears to be superior to comprehension and their lexical use does not necessarily reflect conceptual understanding; their parents must change the hyper-behaviorism interaction style.