A Comparative Study On The Vocabulary Of Autistic Children And Normal Children In 5-6 Years Old

Impairments in language and communication are one of the core obstacles of autism. As universally acknowledged, vocabulary is the cornerstone of language and it is an important factor indicating autistic children’s level of language development. Researches based on the language features and impairments of autistic children have been attracted both domestic and foreign scholars’attention for a long time. However, the published researches and reports about autistic children’s vocabulary proficiency are still deficient.The present thesis studies based on the vocabulary proficiency between preschool high-function autistic (HFA) children and normal children are important. For one thing, it is beneficial for the researchers to comprehensively find out the basic laws for the vocabulary proficiency development of HFA children and provide a basic theoretical foundation for further HFA research. For another, the research, by comparing and analyzing differences of the vocabulary proficiency between HFA children and normal children finding out the weakness in the language comprehension and expression of HFA children, can provide an important practice foundation in the language intervention and rehabilitation for the HFA children. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to investigate the basic characteristics and laws of HFA children’s lexical cognition and to compare the difference between the HFA children and normal children respectively. Moreover, some recommendations are proposed for HFA children education.Based on the relevant literatures, two factors, the vocabulary breadth (VB) and vocabulary depth (VD) are chosen as the criteria for vocabulary proficiency evaluation.26HFA children and normal children are selected and tested respectively and a series of experiments are launched and conducted to investigate their vocabulary proficiency. Firstly, Word Identification and Word Naming test are employed to investigate VB. Secondly, word association and word creation are introduced to make sense of the VD. By means of the previous mentioned tests, the experimental results are demonstrated as follows. Firstly, there are significant differences between the HFA children and normal children which mainly are reflected on VB and VD characteristics. The word-base of the HFA children is significant less than the normal children. Besides, HFA children’s word understanding and word creation are also weaker than normal children, while their lexical cohesion ability is generally similar to the normal children. Unique laws are found in HFA children’ways of vocabulary understanding and expressing after the analysis and discussion of the experimental results. Firstly, they tend to give priority over sound perception. Secondly, more phenomenon of semantic generalization and self-coined words are found in the process of HFA children’s vocabulary expressing.Implications of HFA children education are proposed on the basis of the above findings. They are:strengthen the combination of sound and semantics according to HFA children’s priority over sound perception; improve morpheme awareness to strengthen their vocabulary application ability; and combine semantics with context to deepen HFA children’s understanding of vocabulary.