ABSTRACT
The autistic child is a socialization failure. One of the major characteristics of autism which both illustrates and perpetuates this failure is defective speech development. The nature of speech peculiarities in autistic children has been described by Kanner (1948) and according to Rimland (1964) lack of speech is found in almost one-half of all such children. The follow-up studies of Kanner and Eisenberg (1955) indicate that presence or absence of speech by age five has important prognostic implications. Almost without exception the autistic child who reached his fifth birthday without developing speech failed to improve his level of socialization in later years. Even with psychotherapy, autistic, atypical children who had no speech by age three were found by Brown (1960) to remain severely withdrawn and generally unimproved.
