Autism and specific language impairment (SLI) are developmental disorders that, although distinct by definition, have in common some features of both language and social behavior. The goal of this study was to further explore the extent to which specific clinical features of autism are seen in SLI. The children with the two disorders, matched for non-verbal IQ, were compared on the Autism Diagn...

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric illness in which disorders of thought content are a prominent feature. The disruption of normal flow of thought, or "Formal Thought Disorder" (FTD), has been traditionally assessed through the content and form of patients' speech, and speech abnormalities in schizophrenia were considered as a by-product of the disruption in conceptual structures and associative pr...

Autism is characterized by a chronic, severe impairment in social relations. Recent studies of language in autism also show pervasive deficits in pragmatics. We assume, uncontroversially, that these two deficits are linked, since pragmatics is part of social competence. This paper reviews the literature describing these deficits, and then considers two different psychological theories of these ...

BACKGROUND Pragmatic communication abilities may depend on intact frontal lobe systems. Independent evidence suggests that some persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) are impaired on measures of frontal lobe function. HYPOTHESIS We therefore hypothesized in Study 1 that pragmatic communication skills would be impaired in some persons with PD and would be linked to frontal dysfunction in these ...

The present study examines the validity of the Dutch Children's Communication Checklist (CCC) for children in kindergarten in a community sample, in order to assess the feasibility of using it as a screening instrument in the general population. Teachers completed the CCC for a representative sample of 1396 children at kindergarten level, taken from 53 primary schools in The Netherlands. The CC...

BACKGROUND Peer relations is a vulnerable area of functioning in children with specific language impairment (SLI), but little is known about the developmental trajectories of individuals. METHODS Peer problems were investigated over a 9-year period (from 7 to 16 years of age) in 171 children with a history of SLI. Discrete factor growth modelling was used to chart developmental trajectories. ...

Language users are remarkably good at making inferences about speakers’ intentions in context, and children learning their native language also display substantial skill in acquiring the meanings of unknown words. These two cases are deeply related: Language users invent new terms in conversation, and language learners learn the literal meanings of words based on their pragmatic inferences abou...

The Children's Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2) is often applied to assess pragmatic language impairment which highly prevalent in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and several mental health conditions. We replicated previous findings on the limited applicability of CCC-2 clinical samples inconsistent concerning factor structure. aim present study was, thus, develop a concise, simplified, revised...