The Effect of Autism Degree on Children's Verbal Communication Ability: The Mediating Role of Cognitive Function

Autism is a developmental disorder of the nervous system, the main symptom of which is a lag in verbal communication skills. Cognitive function, as an important ability, may affect the verbal communication ability of autistic patients. The aim of this study is to explore the reason why those children with autism have a difficulty in communication, and to confirm the role of cognitive function. This study adopted the experimental method and recruited 200 non-autistic children and children with different degrees of autism as subjects. Natural observation and questionnaire survey were used to verify the influence of autism degree on verbal communication ability of patients, and explore the mediating role of cognitive function. The hypotheses of this study is that the cognitive function will influence the communication skill of children with autism, and play a mediating role, and the result is there are differences in communication skill between non-autistic children and children with autism, and the degree of autism and the cognitive function causes those differences between the communicative competence in autism and typical children.