Abstract The global prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has increased progressively in recent years. Of note is that expressive language level of five-year-old children with ASD is one of the strongest predictors of outcomes in ASD. Despite the rich literature investigating expressive language development in young children learning Indo-European languages, limited research has explored the current status of the expressive language development of the general population of preschool Chinese children with ASD. The present article first summarizes the characteristics of early expressive language development of preschool children with ASD learning Indo-European languages, and then reviews our recent large-scale studies evaluating expressive language development of the general population of preschool Chinese children with ASD. Specifically, adopting the language assessments of the Putonghua Communicative Development Inventory, these studies have evaluated the lexical, grammatical, pragmatic/socially-based subdomains of language in Chinese preschool children with ASD across the spectrum, making comparisons within the ASD group or across populations (with typically developing children or other groups of children with language delay). The results suggest that Chinese preschool children with ASD demonstrate severe delay in expressive language development. Moreover, the children with ASD vary hugely in their expressive language skills, which is manifested in a number of ways including the varied rate of expressive language development, as well as the exhibition of the variability of expressive language development across and within language domains. These findings highlight the urgency of enforcing efficient early language intervention in Chinese preschool children with ASD; moreover, they also offer specific guidance to the language intervention plans for preschool children with ASD in China.
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