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.

• Asperger Syndrome
• discourse
• spatial deixis
• social deixis
• Finnish

Notes

1. All the examples presented in this article have been purged from such symbols as hesitation markers and repeated segments, since the focus of the present argumentation is on turn-structure.