Speech and Oral Discourse in a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Study of Spontaneous Bilingualism. Part I: Clinical and Anamnestic Evaluation

Abstract

Impaired communication and speech behavior is considered to be one of the key manifestations of childhood autism. At the same time speech disorders in children with autism have not been sufficiently studied. In a meta-analysis of the modern studies of autism, we present different theories explaining relations between the childhood autism and im­pairments in verbal communication; among others, we focus mainly on semantic-pragmatic and structural-functional levels of speech; spontaneous bilingualism is also discussed. The study describes in detail a case of childhood autism in a Lithuanian-speaking boy D., followed for 6 years. The uniqueness of the given case is that at the very early age D. started demonstrating a preference of English for his native language. Moreover, he learned English exclusively on the basis of media resources found on the Internet by his parents (at his request) and himself. The paper (Part 1) includes detailed information on how verbal communication is formed and data of assessments carried out by a multi­disciplinary group of experts as well as several post-testings by a psychologist and speech-language pathologist.