Communicative Abilities in Autism: Evidence for Attentional Deficits

Relação entre os aspectos sócio cognitivos e perfil funcional da comunicação em um grupo de adolescentes do espectro autístico

“…Searching for a relation with the linguistic context, Bernard-Optiz (1982) observed an autistic child and verified that the pragmatic behavior varies according to the situation. Watson (1988) realized that autistic children's mothers tend to adapt to the communicative behavior of their children.…”

Language Assessment in Autism

“…This data correspond to the expected, as more verbal communication decreases the necessity of gestures, since for this subjects, the redundancy of communicative means doesn't increases the efficacy of communication. On the other side, various researches suggest that there is no correlation between communicative competency and the morphological abilities of these children (for example : Wetherby & Prutting, 1984;Bara et al, 2001). The association between social-cognitive performance, functional communication profile and lexical abilities indicated that: 1. better results on vocal communicative intent were associated to greater proportion of verbal expression and less use of gestures, agreeing with the notion that communicative performance tends to be better when there is communicative intent (Carpenter & Tomasello, 2001); 2. better performance on combinatory play was related to less use of vocal communicative mean, a result that can be associated to the fact that both areas involve motor abilities, that can be altered in just some of these children (Mundy & Stella, 2001); 3. better results on symbolic play were related to greater use of interpersonal communicative functions, what seems to reinforce the use of these situations during language therapy with autistic children, as suggested by Gutstein & Sheely, 2002 and larger numbers of usual verbal designations, greater proportions of interpersonal communicative functions expressed and smaller proportions of the use of gestures were associated -this data can be due to the relation between lexical performance and language use, as proposed by Befi-Lopes, 2007.…”

“…This observation confirms prior studies (Grindle et al, 2009) that concluded that autistic children are less responsive to interactive attempts and have less spontaneous communication. Other studies (Bara et al, 2001;Davis & Carter, 2008;Laugeson et al, 2009;Reed et al, 2007) report the severe impairment of autistic children in the interactive use of communication to specific functions.…”

“…For example, although the complete false belief task was the most complex and the one that produced the greater number of wrong answers, it was also the one that generated the smaller number of non-answers. It may be due to the fact that it was the only task on which the material presented was concrete and not pictures, and it may be associated to the ideas of Bara et al (2001) that suggested that these children's difficulties are related to attention deficits that can be reduced by the use of concrete elements. Data show that, of the 17 subjects that responded to any of the meta-representation tasks, none of them presented the right answer to all the questions.…”

Facilitated Communication and Authorship: A Systematic Review

“…In the peer-reviewed literature, 11 studies (all dated within the period 2001 -2012) met the criteria for level two analysis: Bara, Bocciarelli, and Colle (2001); Bernardi and Tuzzi (2011a;2011b); Bigozzi, Zanobini, Tarchi, Cozzani, and Camba (2012) …”