Lexical Diversity of High - Functioning Autistic Children

Kim, Ji Eun; Kim, Young Tae

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2002;7(1): 13-29.

Ji Eun Kim^` , and Young Tae Kim^`

김지은(Ji Eun Kim)| 김영태(Young Tae Kim)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the present study was to compare the lexical diversities between 15 highfunctioning autistic and 15 normally developing children, who were matched with their equivalent ages of comprehension (by Korean Picture Vocabulary Test ) and expression in terms of MLU. The participant s were asked to describe the stimulus pictures in a wordless picture book, sequence cards, and event picture cards. Their narrative utterances of 100 sentences were collected from each child and analyzed using the following measures of lexical diver sity: TNW, NDW, TNW and NDW of the major form classes: nouns, verbs, modifiers (including adjectives, unconjugated adjectives and adverbs), and function words (post - positional word), patterns in verb use (i.e., lexical verbs, GAP verbs, verb omission), semantic categories in verb use (i.e., action verb and change- of- state verb). The results of the present study were as follows: (1) no significant group differences were found in measures of TNW, but significant differences were found in measures of NDW, (2) no significant group differences were found in lexical diver sity of nouns, modifier sm and function words, but significant differences were found in lexical diversity of verbs, (3) the high- functioning autistic children were much more likely to produce GAP verbs and to omit verbs than their language- age matched counterparts, (4) no significant differences were found in the frequencies of change- of- state verbs.

Keywords: 고기능 자폐 | 어휘다양도 | 전체 낱말수(TNW) | 다른 낱말수(NDW) | 이야기 산출과제