The image of mind in the language of children with autism

While it is widely agreed today that autism involves a cognitive change (Baron-Cohen, 1988), the main psychological models have put the explanatory weight on changes in such nonlinguistic neurocognitive variables as “theory of mind” (ToM), weak central coherence, or executive functioning. Linguistic deficits, including ones identified as “pragmatic” and taken to be universal in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (Tager-Flusberg, 1996; Lord and Paul, 1997; TagerFlusberg et al., 2001), or even the absence of functional language could then be seen as a secondary consequence of a primary defect in non-linguistic (particularly social) cognition (Mundy and Markus, 1997). A “modular” perspective, which separates language from cognition, has been widely adopted with regard to the internal organization of language itself, which is taken to comprise phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics as relatively independent components. In this regard, Tager-Flusberg (1981) formulates the classical view that “phonological and syntactic development follow the same course as in normal children and in other disordered groups, though at a slowed rate, while semantic and pragmatic functioning may be specially deficient in autism.”