Emphasis and Meaning in Recall in Normal and Autistic Children

An experiment was designed to investigate the effects of some aspects of phonological and syntactic structure of verbal material on recall in normal and autistic children. It was found that autistic children were impaired in their appreciation of syntactic structure but not of phonological structure. It was also found that there are developmental changes in the influence of these variables. With increasing cognitive development meaningful grammatical context gains in importance whereas the dependence on emphasis decreases.