Language acquisition in autism spectrum disorders: A developmental review

Abstract

This paper reviews the complex literature on language acquisition in the autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Because of the high degree of interest in ASD in the past decade, the field has been changing rapidly, with progress in both basic science and applied clinical areas. In addition, psycholinguistically-trained researchers have increasingly begun to test theories of language acquisition in studies of ASD, because it is characterized by meaningful differences in ability across a wide range of language, social, and cognitive domains. As such, ASD has served as a “natural laboratory” in which to explore a variety of theories of language acquisition. We provide an overview of the current state of knowledge of language acquisition in autism spectrum disorders, also noting gaps in our current knowledge. We also review implications of this work for theories of typical language acquisition, and discuss some promising future directions. While the pragmatic deficits that characterize autism spectrum disorders are widely acknowledged, both clinicians and researchers should consider the phonological and morphosyntactic differences that likely play an important role in language comprehension and production for affected children.