Grammar and lexicon in individuals with autism: a quantitative analysis of a large italian corpus.

Statistical and linguistic procedures were implemented to analyze a large corpus of texts written by 37 individuals with autism and 92 facilitators (without disabilities) producing written conversations by means of PCs. Such texts were compared and contrasted in order to identify the specific traits of the lexis of the group of individuals with autism and assess to what extent it differs from the lexis of the facilitators. This work is aimed at identifying specific language features by means of statistical procedures based on the analysis of contingency lexical tables reporting the frequencies of words and grammatical categories in different sub-corpora and different writers. The results support the existence of lexis and distributional patterns of grammatical categories which seem to be distinctive of the written production of individuals with autism and different from those characterizing the texts produced by facilitators.