Ineficacia en la comunicación referencial de personas con autismo y otros trastornos relacionados: un estudio empírico

Resum

This study examines the perfonnance of 30 high-functioning children and adolescents with autism and other related childhood disorders in a referential communication task where they were asked to play the role of speaker. The structure and changes of the messages produced by the subgroups in the first and last trial of the task were analyzed. Three different patterns were identified confirming that the pragmatic -and specifically, the referential- deficits constitute a relevant clinical trait for all these groups although they probably reflect several and dzperent cognitive disorders. We point up the usefulness of referential communication tasks to test the validity of subgroups increasingly referred to as the "autistic continuum or spectrum disorders", and propose some hypotheses conceming the cognitive base of their communicative referential dificulties. Some implications for the design of training and educational programs are finally derived from the analysis of changes in messages in two different trials of the task.