Linguistic performance in vulnerable and autistic children and their mothers.

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.