Language comprehension and speech production in young children with autism spectrum disorder: Psycho-linguistic insights on restricted, repetitive behaviors and interests.

In this chapter Dromi, Oren, and Mimouni-Bloch review language development among children with ASD. They discuss speech production, comprehension, and development and review research regarding echolalia, verbal rituals, stereotyped language, and memorized speech, which are part of the symptoms listed in DSM-5 under RRBIs. Dromi and colleagues argue that the distinction between communication, language, and speech is vital for describing the linguistic profile of children with ASD because young children with ASD are more likely to have weaker language comprehension skills than speech production skills, whereas the opposite is true for typically developing children. Important linguistic milestones, skills, and abilities such as babbling, age of first words, pitch, voice, intonation, pronoun reversals, and difficulties in linguistic inferences of metaphors and idioms are also reviewed. Owing to the paucity of research, the relations between severity of RRBI and various language skills is not well known; thus, future research should address this issue considering severity of symptoms, level of functioning, and subtypes of RRBI across the lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)