Linguistic reflections of social engagement in Asperger discourse and narratives: A quantitative analysis of two cases.
The present linguistic analyses of two children (aged 8 and 10) with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and their two matched controls are based on dyadic therapist-child conversations and on picture description tasks. The circa 100 analysis features covering aspects of (i) lexicon (e.g. prominalization), (ii) structural characteristics of turns, (iii) co-operation features (e.g. shared/non-shared elaboration of themes), (iv) prosody, (v) cognitive aspects (e.g. involvement/commitment, world of discourse) and (vi) affect features, show that the AS speakers describe, rather than narrate their conceptualizations, whether (practically) self-initiated (dyadic discourse) or prompted through pictures (narratives). In previous experimental studies of spatially deictic expressions and spatial orientation, it has been shown that the spatial and low-level social cognition of these AS subjects was unimpaired. However, in the present study AS discourse carries features of impaired inter-personal and inter-subjective performance, manifest, for example, in linguistic deixis, atypical power-oriented features and lack of joint activity.
Department of Linguistics, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland. jussi.niemi@uef.fi
Jussi
J
Niemi
Lidia
L
Otsa
Aleksandra
A
Evtyukova
Laura
L
Lehtoaro
John
J
Niemi
D000339:Affect; D020817:Asperger Syndrome / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D033262:Narration; D012919:Social Behavior; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014743:Videotape Recording