Am J Psychiatry 1976; 133:909-915
Copyright © 1976 by American Psychiatric Association
Linguistic performance in vulnerable and autistic children and their mothers
SM Frank, DA Allen, L Stein and B Myers
The authors studied the language patterns of schizophrenic mothers and
their 4-year-old children, and compared them with the speech of normal
mothers and children and normal mothers with autistic children. They found
that children of schizophrenic mothers showed lags in language development
and language distortions less severe than but in some ways similar to those
seen in autistic children. Schizophrenic mothers were more likely to
produce more deficient and/or distorted language in interactions with their
children. Mothers of autistic children produced language that was equal to
or above that of mothers of normal children on most parameters and adjusted
their language to the chronological rather than the linguistic age of the
child.
