| Ninety-six language samples by children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) and typically-developing (TD) children, ages four to seven years were analyzed according to linguistically-motivated coding criteria. In comparing the use of discourse-constructing linguistic structures between the two groups, it was found that the grammatical abilities of children with and without HFA are comparable for children in this age range. An in-depth analysis of the use of questions showed that children with HFA used significantly more questions in their discourse, and that more of these questions were off-topic. Likewise, a difference in distribution was found in some of the functions for which children in the two groups used their questions. It was concluded that the use of the same linguistic forms for different conversational functions by the children with HFA may be due to their difficulties in conversational pragmatics. |
