The development of social-conversational skills in children with autism spectrum disorder: similarities and differences with typically developing children and late talkers. Pilot study.

Abstract

Many studies have emphasized the importance of the development of pragmatic skills in young children. Pragmatic deficits, reflected in poor conversational skills, are considered the hallmark of language impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Our study has compared the assertive and responsive skills of a group of 600 typically developing children, 83 late talkers (LT) and 29 children with ASD (of which 24 boys and 5 girls) aged between 27 and 60 months using the questionnaires the "Child's First Vocabulary- Gestures, Words and Phrases"- PVB and "The Child's Socio-Conversational Skills"- ASCB. The analysis of the results showed that the socio-conversational abilities of children with autism improve with increasing age, that the gap in these abilities between children with typical development and those with ASD is very wide and the differences between the two samples are statistically significant. Moreover, the percentage of LTs with immature assertive and responsive skills is lower than the percentage of autistic children; in fact, despite difficulties in lexical and morphosyntactic development, the absence of deficits in social interaction allows LTs to perform better.