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.

Latent sources, motivations and even meanings, at least to some extent, of seemingly disorganized utterances can become analysable through linguistic analyses. The results suggest that continuity in the treatment is essential, because a practitioner who shares background knowledge with the patient has better opportunities to capture the relevance of the superficially disorganized utterances. Moreover, especially the most disorganized sequences should warrant thorough attention because they can convey, beneath their unexpected or obscure surface structure, items which are psychologically important to the patient. The results of this study should be taken into account in the training of interactional skills of professionals who work with schizophrenia patients.

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