Hi everyone, I am Cassey Parco and now I will discuss the relevant and important facts about

Autism.

* It says here, at age 4 their joint attention skills are markedly deficient. When we say joint
attention it pertains to the shared focus of two individuals on an object. So this means that an
autistic child has problems or difficulties sharing their attention to an object with another kid or
another individual. This is one of the most common symptoms of autism.

* It also states here that they have difficulty with speaker roles in discourse and make pronoun
reversal errors wherein they mistake “I” for “you” and vice versa. This basically means autistic
children have speech disorders and difficulty understanding basic communication. Autistic
persons have actually more difficulties fulfilling communicative competence compared to
linguistic competence. That is why it is difficult to have a successful conversation with an
individual with autism regardless of their me tal capacity.

* Next, they have difficulty responding appropriately to indirect requests. Meaning they have
difficulty reading gestures that may indicate something, or they have difficulty deducing the
thinking, tone of voice, and facial expression of the person they are talking to. And the last one
is just as relevant as difficulty in communicating and some of their characteristics.

Moving on to the next slide, let us know the language profile of individuals with autism.

As I have said earlier, autistic people can learn language or they can learn how to talk or how to
say things, however … The problem is how they will communicate using it. So they illustrate the
dissociability of language and communication. It is like, they know how to talk or they know the
language, but don’t know how to communicate with it. That is one characteristic of their
condition. This is related to what we also discussed earlier, when I said that they have difficulty
deducing the gestures and tone of who they talk to, that is one factor also why they have
difficulty in communicating.

Moreover, it says here that autistic people who are not mentally retarded can acquire phonology,
or the branch of linguistics that deals with systems of sounds. lexicon or vocabulary, and
grammar and such. We know that autism spectrum disorder is a neurological and
developmental disorder but actually mental capacity still varies from person to person. Some
autistic people have a more functional mental capacity or the computational system to be
specific. A factor for this can also be age. If you would look further, most children with autism
actually have manifestations of echolalia, or the way of meaninglessly repeating the words
spoken by another person. Some autistic individuals have manifestation of this, but others have
not.

Now we move on to Specific Language Impairment. Specific language impairment (SLI) is a

communication disorder that interferes with the development of language skills in children who
have no hearing loss. SLI can affect a child's speaking, listening, reading, and writing. SLI is
also called developmental language disorder, language delay, or developmental dysphasia.
Regarding this, you will se that people with SLI shows developmental delay, delay or deviance,
and asynchrony in their linguistic skills.

Onto the next slide, developmental delay in SLI can be seen in children as a type of
communication disorder. You can see it as a language delay seen when children don’t meet the
language developmental milestones for their age. It can also be manifested by language
abilities that develop at a slower rate, or having trouble expressing theirselves or understanding
others. The delay may involve a combination of hearing, speech, and cognitive impairments.

Actually this topic arouses some argument because researchers are asking if the language of
children with SLI are only delayed or deviant also. Researchers believe that the language is
delayed when there is a repetition of the same grammatical structure and use of the same kind
of phonological processes and vocabulary. But they also add that aside from that, children with
SLI’s language are deviant also. The reason for this is because researchers learned that some
children with SLI make errors that are different from typical errors made by a developing child.