Simon N
Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1975 Nov;32(11):1439-46. doi: 10.1001/archpsyc.1975.01760290107013.
The speech of echolalic autistic children is (1) specifically lacking in appropriate use of expressive-intonational features, but (2) the echolalic child's clear articulation of words and phrases indicates that discrimination of phonemic features is intact. The impairment in aphasic disorders is just the reverse. Failure to attend to auditory stimuli and the characteristic language disorder are among the most consistent findings in autistic children; they could be related. Discrimination of differential stress emphasis is the way the normal young child extracts major morphemic word stems and syntactic features from environmental speech; this may be a primitive perceptual function of brain stem auditory centers. The brain stem auditory system is especially vulnerable to perinatal injury. Damage to this system is an example of the kind of lesion that might lead to behavioral handicaps without neurological signs.
（1）特别缺乏对表达性语调特征的恰当运用，但是（2）模仿言语型儿童对单词和短语的清晰发音表明其音位特征辨别能力是完好的。失语症的损伤情况则恰恰相反。未能注意听觉刺激以及典型的语言障碍是自闭症儿童中最常见的发现；它们可能存在关联。对不同重音强调的辨别是正常幼儿从环境言语中提取主要词素词干和句法特征的方式；这可能是脑干听觉中枢的一种原始感知功能。脑干听觉系统在围产期特别容易受到损伤。该系统的损伤就是那种可能导致无神经学体征的行为障碍的损伤类型的一个例子。
