Speech patterns of five psychotic children now in adolescence

Thought disorder in childhood

OBJECTIVE

This paper delineates the evolution of the concept of thought disorder and presents a developmental/neurobehavioral theory of the main components of formal thought disorder in childhood-onset schizophrenia.

METHOD

A review of past and recent clinical, cognitive, and linguistic studies of thought disorder in childhood-onset schizophrenia presents the main features and changes in the thought disorder concept.

RESULTS

The review emphasizes that, in the past, this term was used to describe a variety of clinical manifestations in a heterogenous group of children because of the lack of distinction between childhood schizophrenia and infantile autism. The studies that have been conducted during the past 15 years, however, have demonstrated well-defined clinical components of thought disorder and their cognitive/information processing, linguistic/pragmatic, and biological correlates.

CONCLUSIONS

A functional conceptualization of formal thought disorder in childhood-onset schizophrenia is presented in light of the theoretical and clinical implications of the reviewed studies.

Affect and cognition in autism

An array of six photographs of the same woman was used to assess the ability of 18 autistic, 14 nonautistic mentally retarded, and 18 normal preschool subjects to use affect- and activity-related concepts in the solution of cognitive tasks. The Total Performance Level of the autistic and mentally retarded subjects did not differ significantly. Autistic subjects performed imitation, directed action, and description tasks less well in the affect mode. The findings are consistent with other studies, suggesting an impairment in the expression of emotion in autism.

Delayed echolalia in autism: some observations on differences within the term

Attention has recently focused on the need to build up a corpus of case observations relating to the function of delayed echolalia in various handicapping conditions but especially in early childhood autism. This present article offers six functional categories as an aid to clear reporting of observation and, thus clarification of this little-understood facet of deviant language development.