Linguistic reflections of social engagement in Asperger discourse and narratives: A quantitative analysis of two cases

Abstract

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.

Disordered semantic activation in disorganized discourse in schizophrenia: a new pragma‐linguistic tool for structure and meaning reconstruction

“…In a previous study of discourse in Asperger's syndrome we have shown that analyses focusing on local features of short passages of discourse cannot handle phenomena typical in pathological populations (especially long-term topic resumption; Niemi et al 2010). Therefore, we chose to analyse systematically every single turn and adjacency pair by paying special attention to recurring topics and referents.…”

Pilot assessment of nonverbal pragmatic ability in people with asperger syndrome

“…To achieve this, an individual evaluation with each subject took place beforehand. As with Niemi et al (2010), our observations were based on dyadic therapist-child conversations and on picture description tasks. The same pictures were shown to each of the AS subjects and all of them received the same instructions.…”

Stories of students with autism, their lived experiences and journey throughout education: A narrative analysis

“…There was a small number of five participants which meant that generalisability was not possible. Although, for narrative research purposes, five participants is on par with the average for other narrative research studies [332][333][334][335] and the low numbers are due to the nature of this form of research. Generalisability was also not possible due to the five participants being recruited from the same university (although two went to a different undergraduate university) thus all sharing similar support experiences at this university.…”

“…This number was in line with an average for other narrative reviews in either the same or similar research fields (narrative literature reviewed as of 8/2/19). [332][333][334][335] Using a representative sample group enabled me to apply participants' data, in the context of current evidence-based literature, to the wider population in question.…”