In this article, we leverage theoretical insights and methodological guidelines of discourse analytic scholarship to re-examine language phenomena typically associated with autism. Through empirical analysis of the verbal behavior of three children with autism, we engage the question of how prototypical features of autistic language-notably pronoun atypicality, pragmatic deficit, and echolalia-might conceal competencies and interactional processes that are largely invisible in mainstream research. Our findings offer a complex picture of children with autism in their use of language to communicate, interact and experience others. Such a picture also deepens our understanding of the interactional underpinnings of autistic children's speech. Finally, we describe how our findings offer fruitful suggestions for clinical intervention.

In this article, we invite a rethinking of traditional perspectives of language in autism. We advocate a theoretical reappraisal that offers a corrective to the dominant and largely tacitly held view that language, in its essence, is a referential system and a reflection of the individual's cognition. Drawing on scholarship in Conversation Analysis and linguistic anthropology, we present a multidimensional view of language, showing how it also functions as interactional accomplishment, social action, and mode of experience. From such a multidimensional perspective, we revisit data presented by other researchers that include instances of prototypical features of autistic speech, giving them a somewhat different-at times complementary, at times alternative-interpretation. In doing so, we demonstrate that there is much at stake in the view of language that we as researchers bring to our analysis of autistic speech. Ultimately, we argue that adopting a multidimensional view of language has wide ranging implications, deepening our understanding of autism's core features and developmental trajectory.

This paper presents an analytic approach for understanding the interplay through time between “scientific” and “everyday concepts” in a mathematics classroom community. To illustrate the approach, we focus on an elementary classroom implementing an integers and fractions lesson sequence that makes use of the number line as a principal representational context. In our analysis of the community's emerging collective practices (recurring structures of joint activity), we trace the interplay between children's sensorimotor actions (displacing, counting, and splitting) and the mathematical definitions supported in the classroom, like definitions of unit interval or equivalent fractions. In our illustrative analysis, we find that the teacher orchestrated collective practices to support the use of actions to make sense of the formal definitions, and the use of definitions to regulate actions. Though we illustrate the analytic approach for a particular classroom community, the approach illuminates teaching-learning dynamics that transcend any particular classroom or subject matter domain.

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