Communicative behavior of adults with an autistic four-year-old boy and his nonhandicapped twin brother

Sixteen female preschool teachers were videotaped playing in dyads with a nonverbal, socially unresponsive autistic 4-year-old boy and his nonhandicapped fraternal twin brother. Eight adults were informed that the autistic child had a language disability and did not talk or understand much language; eight adults were not informed about any differences between the children. Language to the autistic child was simpler, more concrete, and more often accompanied by gestures than language to his brother for both groups of subjects. Informed teachers made greater speech modifications to the autistic child and were more successful at keeping him on-task than uninformed adults. The theoretical and practical implications of communicative adjustments to children with language and social impairments are discussed.A portion of this paper was submitted as a master's colloquim paper to the University of Minnesota by the second author and presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Los Angeles, April 1981. The research was supported by a Graduate Research Grant to the first author and by the Center for Research in Human Learning.