Indicators of linguistic processing constraints in the narratives of individuals with high-functioning autism

A current model of autism proposes that it is a disorder of information processing. The purpose of this study was to compare the language production of adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) to that of age and Verbal IQ-matched controls with respect to speech disruptions and formulaic expressions, features which indicate linguistic processing challenges. Standard language measures and language samples from the ADOS Telling a Story from a Book and Create a Story tasks were collected and analyzed. No between-group measures were found to be statistically significant. However, 10 of 16 individuals with HFA exhibited speech disruptions consistent with clinically "tangled" speech. A number of the individuals with HFA used idiosyncratic versions of formulaic expressions consistent with an underlying difference in language acquisition. The findings suggest that some individuals with HFA may have greater difficulty with linguistic processing than others consistent with proposals from previous research on language subgroups in autism.