http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1257-5341
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ABSTRACT
This study describes the role of ungrammatical utterances and disfluent speech in the creation of comprehension problems between the participants in group therapy sessions of preadolescents with autism. The speech of the autistic preadolescents included frequent disfluencies and morpho-syntactic problems, such as wrong case endings, ambiguous pronominal references, grammatically incoherent syntactic structures and inaccurate tenses, which caused problems of comprehension. Three different interactional trajectories occurred when solving the potential problems of comprehension following the morpho-syntactically disfluent turns. First, the disfluent turn sometimes led to a clarification request by a co-participant, either a therapist or another participant with ASD. The preadolescents with ASD showed interactional skilfulness in requesting clarification when faced with comprehension problems. Second, in contrast, other occurrences included one or several self-repairs by the speaker with ASD. In these cases, the other group participants either did not react or they encouraged the speaker to continue using discourse particles. If the self-repairing disfluencies led to a persisting problem of comprehension, the therapists sometimes intervened and resolved the problem. However, direct interventions by the therapists were infrequent because the participants with ASD were mostly able to resolve the comprehension problems by themselves. Third, some disfluent and/or grammatically incorrect turns were not treated as problematic by the co-participants nor by the speaker himself.
Abbreviations: ADE: Adessive; ALL: Allative; CLI: clitic; GEN: Genitive; INE: Inessive; NOM: Nominative; PER: person; PL: plural; PRT: particle; SG: singular
Transcription conventions
| . | = | strongly falling pitch at the end of a prosodic unit |
| ; | = | slightly falling pitch at the end of a prosodic unit |
| , | = | flat pitch at the end of a prosodic unit, |
| ? | = | slightly rising pitch at the end of a prosodic unit |
| ? | = | strongly rising pitch at the end of a prosodic unit |
| ↓ | = | segment produced on a lower pitch level than the surrounding speech |
| ↑ | = | segment produced on a higher pitch level than the surrounding speech |
| # | = | creaky voice |
| sika | = | prominent stress |
| >tosi< | = | accelerated speech rate |
| <paitsi> | = | slowed speech rate |
| joo: | = | lengthened vowel |
| MITÄ | = | increased level of loudness |
| .hhh | = | clearly audible inhalation (one ‘h’ corresponds to 0.1 s) |
| hhh | = | clearly audible exhalation (one ‘h’ corresponds to 0.1 s) |
| .joo | = | word produced with an inhalation |
| @just@ | = | marked voice |
| k(h)iva | = | word produced laughingly |
| £niimpä£ | = | word produced smilingly |
| ∙nii∙ | = | word produced more quietly than the surrounding speech |
| [ | = | overlap of speech begins |
| ] | = | overlap of speech ends |
| (.) | = | micropause (duration of less than 0.2 s) |
| (0.6) | = | pause (duration measured in seconds) |
| (lapset) | = | unclear speech |
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Emil Aaltonen Foundation and Kone Foundation for having funded this research project.
Statement of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Notes
1 Asperger syndrome (AS) is a diagnostic classification that falls within the autism spectrum. It was a former specific diagnostic category within the autism spectrum (American Psychiatric Association (APA), Citation2000), which was later merged within the larger diagnostic category of autism (APA, Citation2013).
2 By ‘ungrammatical utterances’ we refer to utterances that include morpho-syntactic problems (such as wrong case endings, cut-off syntactic structures, tense problems, etc.) or/and erroneous lexical choices.
3 In this study, ‘comprehension problems’ are materialised by other-initiated repairs. An ‘other-initiated repair’ is a repair that results from a process that was begun by the addressee of the problematic utterance (Schegloff et al., Citation1977; SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, Citation2018).
4 Surian’s (Citation1996) study, for example, provides more evidence about the role of ‘theory of mind’ deficits in the pragmatic difficulties of autistic children.
5 One of the characteristics of ASD is a lack of eagerness to share interests, joys and achievements with others or to show interest in other people’s preoccupations (APA, Citation2013). Reciprocal social interaction, in general, is difficult for people with ASD. For these reasons, sharing news and asking questions are practised in therapy groups.
6 By ‘morpho-syntactic disfluency’ we refer to utterances where the disfluency is created by morpho-syntactic problems, such as wrong case endings, cut-off syntactic structures, and tense problems.
7 As the therapists do not comment at all on the contents of what the boy has just said, it is however not certain that they have completely understood it. Indeed, the discourse particles that the therapists produce here constitute ‘displays of understanding rather than ‘proofs of understanding’ (Sacks, Citation1992).
8 We have removed 42 lines of transcription here from a passage where the person who is responsible for the sound recording intervenes due to a technical problem. After that, the conversation continues.