Semantic and Syntactic Properties of Words and the Receptive-Expressive Gap in Autistic and Non-Autistic Children.

The semantic and syntactic compositions of autistic and non-autistic children's vocabularies are similar. Thus, while receptive vocabularies are relatively smaller for autistic children, they do not appear to have specific difficulty with words that have particular syntactic or semantic properties, or with adding words to the expressive vocabulary that they already understand.