Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Language Disorders 249

to make friends or love relationships seemed to reflect a primary lack of
social interest and skill; it was not simply a secondary consequence of the
social restrictions imposed by communication difficulties.
These findings suggest some sort of continuum between classical autism
and receptive language disorder. However, another follow-up finding
points to differences rather than continuities between autism and recep-
tive language disorder. Autistic spectrum disorders are rarely associated
with subsequent psychosis, whereas receptive language disorder (with
or without pragmatic language impairment and other mild features of
autism) does seem to carry an increased risk of florid paranoid psychosis
in adolescence.

Subject review

Bishop DVM, Norbury CF. (2008) Speech and language disorders.In:
Rutter Met al.(eds)Rutter’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry,5thedn.
Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, pp. 782–801.

Further reading

Bishop DVM, Adams C. (1989) Conversational characteristics of children
with semantic-pragmatic disorder. II: What features lead to a judge-
ment of inappropriacy?British Journal of Disorders of Communications 24 ,
241–263. (This paper is full of examples of the sorts of language abnor-
malities found in semantic-pragmatic disorder.)
Law J, Garrett Z. (2004) Speech and language therapy: Its potential role in
CAMHS.Child and Adolescent Mental Health 9 , 50–55.
Mantovani JF. (2000) Autistic regression and Landau-Kleffner syndrome:
Progress or confusion?Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 42 ,
349–353.
Rutter M, Mawhood L. (1991) The long-term psychosocial sequelae of
specific developmental disorders of speech and language.In: Rutter M.,
Casaer P (eds)Biological Risk Factors for Psychosocial Disorders. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, pp. 233–259.