What speech characteristics among students with ASD should be taken into account in educational practice?
Résumé
Why focus specifically on the language of subjects with ASD (autism spectrum disorders)? This question is certainly less obvious than that of communication, behavioral problems or sensory particularities… Yet, "poor conversational (and prosody) skills can hinder the successful integration of children into classrooms and playgrounds" (Attwood, 2010) and jeopardize professional integration...
It should also be noted that to date, 50 % of people with ASD are still considered non-verbal and that it is considered to be of better prognosis the fact that children have language elements at 2 years of age (Rogers and DiLalla, 1990).
We know that oral is very impacted in subjects with ASD (understanding of the implicit, difficulty in grasping the polysemy of words...), but what do we know today of the age of occurrence, the possible damage of the central nervous system, the type of language impairment so as to help us to initiate useful remediations on which to base teaching practices?