Edited by Belma Haznedar and F. Nihan Ketrez
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 20] 2016
► pp. 341–359
Language impairment is considered to be one of the most definitive features of autism. Yet, similar to other capabilities of this population, the language use shows great variability. In an attempt to have a better understanding of how this linguistic impairment is manifested in the Turkish-speaking population, the present case study investigates particular syntactic abilities of a seven-year-old Turkish-speaking child with autism. Spontaneous speech samples of the participant were collected at a single session and analyzed to see whether there were any diversions from the normal language acquisition patterns. The results suggest that the participant differs from his normally developing peers with respect to his syntactic development, in particular his production of verbal functional categories.