The study on the regular past inflections and pluralization morphemes in children with autism spectrum disorders was a survey of 20 children between the ages of 5 – 12 years at Our Lady of Guadalupe (OLG) Health Foundation and Autism Centre, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria. The study investigated to document the level of severity of the morphological deficits of the clients. A judgement sampling technique was used to select autistic children with moderate autism with speech who can still be remediated. The instruments for the collection of data were the Validated Word Structure (WS) assessment comprising 10 pictures and 10 sentences completion tasks as well as reliability test re-test of mean length of utterance (MLU) as examined by experts to be r =94, indicating a high level of internal consistency. The children were made to read a passage containing 100 utterances which were recorded and eventually transcribed for analysis using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcript (SALT) software. Those who were not able to read were ask to repeat after the researcher. The word-based theory was adopted to aid the analysis. From the findings, it was confirmed that the degree of errors, the mean length of utterance in word and morphemes for the production of past tense and plural mophemes were 57.95%, 64.29%, 74.70%, 69.23%, 61.54%, 70.24%, 74.42%, 77.53%, 76.47%,78.82%,79.07%, 76.47%, 78.65%, 76.09%, 74.73%, 83.91%, 78.57%, 75.28%, 75.00%, 78.57%. From the breakdown of the analysis, it indicates that the MLUw and MLUm was below 5.0. it recommended further studies.

Authors:
Victoria Etim, University of Calabar, Nigeria

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Victoria Etim, a lecturer in Linguistics and Nigerian languages, University of Calabar, Nigeria. Clinical linguistics, Morphology and phonology. Regular past inflection and pluralisation morphemes in children with autism spectrum disorders .

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