Enduring the silence: High silence tolerance and other tools for promoting topic initiations of a man with autism

ABSTRACT

Persistent deficits in the ability to initiate social interaction is a core criterion for a diagnosis of autism, and quantitative research shows that children with autism initiate fewer bids for interaction than neurotypical children. This conversation-analytic examination of two interactions between a man with autism, Harry, and two familiar carers will provide insights into the scope of his competences in topic initiation. Analyses of the participants’ online management of turn-taking and sequence organisation demonstrate that Harry’s topic initiations can be facilitated by a high silence tolerance of the interlocutor in initiation-relevant sequential environments. Specifically, Harry initiates more topics, when his conversational partner endures the long silences after possible sequence closure. The analyses underline that Harry does not lack neither competences nor motivation to successfully execute initiations. Instead, it is proposed that Harry’s deficits in initiation should be reconceptualised as a difficulty of initiating interaction on neurotypical terms, where the standard maximum silence between turns is approximately one second. Hereby, the study emphasises that communicative competences of individuals with autism are interactionally managed, emerging in interaction with conversational partners.

KEYWORDS:

• Autism
• initiation
• interaction
• silence
• turn-taking
• conversation analysis

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Jakob Steensig for his valuable feedback on this paper. John Rae also made very insightful comments to an early version of the paper. Moreover, the paper has benefitted from reviews by anonymous reviewers of Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. Finally, I wish to thank all the people who have agreed to let me record their interactions and, thereby, made this research possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The project started before the Research Ethics Committee at Aarhus University was established, and therefore, it was not an opportunity to make an application. Thus, the requirement for the ethics committee’s approval was waived.

² Silences are here classified as either pauses, gaps or lapses (Sacks et al., 1974). ’Pauses’ are intra-turn silences, which do not occur at transition relevance places. ‘Gaps’ occur after a turn has arrived at a transition relevance place and before the beginning of a next turn. ‘Lapses’ are extended gaps, where no one self-selects.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.