Étude développementale des troubles langagiers chez l'enfant autiste: Lexique, morphosyntaxe et pragmatique

This paper presents a first study from a research program on language development in young autistic children in three main linguistic dimensions, lexical, morphosyntactic and pragmatic. Taking a fonctionnalist integrative approach to language development (cf Bates and Mac Whinney, 1979, 1989; Bates and Goodman, 1997; Bassano, 1998, 2000), our research examines the general hypothesis that there first exist disorders in the three linguistic dimensions and that these disorders are inter-related, to some extent. Later on, lexical and morphosyntactic difficulties are expected to diminish, whereas pragmatic difficulties would remain. In the present cross-sectional study, we analyzed the spontaneous speech productions of two groups of autistic children with a verbal age of around 30 and 39 months (five children in each group), who were compared to normally developing children. Children were individually video-recorded during sessions conducted by a professionnal experimentator, and exhaustive transcripts of 25 minutes were made in CHAT format. As expected, deficits were found in the lexical, morphosyntactic and pragmatic domains. However, these deficits were observed at 39 as well as at 30 months. These results are discussed in the light of current theories of language acquisition (Karmiloff-Smith et al., 1995; Tager-Flusberg, 1997) which consider that deficits in theory of mind are crucial in autism.