This research investigates whether children with autism learn picture, word and object relations as associative pairs or whether they understand such relations as referential. In Experiment 1, children were taught a new word (e.g. "whisk") repeatedly paired with a novel picture. When given the picture and a previously unseen real whisk and asked…

A pictorial system allowing receptive communication was implemented with one severely mentally retarded (SMR) and two autistic and SMR children (8.5, 10.4, and 12.8 years old). Although those low functioning children had shown severe problems in learning manual signs, they were successfully taught pictorial representations as communication means.…