The booklet discusses and reports on a study of elicited imitation as a vehicle for assessing the language-functioning level of echolalic autistic children. An historical overview is presented of the diagnosis of early infantile autism. The question of whether or not early infantile autism is a distinct syndrome is addressed. The theoretical and empirical orientations to language behaviors of autistic children are delineated, and the existence of an autistic language is discussed. Studies in child language are reviewed, focusing on those in which elicited imitation is utilized to assess language functioning. The study itself investigated the possible semantic influences underlying the echolalic autistic S' imitative performance. Findings are discussed in terms of mean-length-of-utterance, context versus non-context, syntactic construction, semantic relations, and semantic-syntactic complexity. Among other things, the findings did not identify a language characteristic specific and unique to the so-called early infantile autism syndrome. (DLS)