Speech Acts in Korean Children with Autism

Cho, Sung Sook; Kim, Mi Kyung; Park, Sun Eon; Hong, Eun-Mi; Cho, Sook Whan

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2007;12(2): 215-236.

Sung Sook Cho^` , Mi Kyung Kim^` , Sun Eon Park^` , Eun-Mi Hong^` , and Sook Whan Cho^`

조성숙(Sung Sook Cho)| 김미경(Mi Kyung Kim)| 박선언(Sun Eon Park)| 홍은미(Eun-Mi Hong)| 조숙환(Sook Whan Cho)

ABSTRACT

Background & Objectives
This study addressed two questions: 1) whether children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) differ from language age (LA)-matched control subjects in expressing communicative intents, and 2) what factors may be related to pragmatic development.
Methods
The subjects included 8 Korean-speaking children with ASD and 8 normally-developing (ND) children. The data included spontaneous utterances collected during dyadic activities in two 30-minute-long sessions which were conducted three times. In transcribing, coding, and analyzing the data, this study adopted the systems developed by MacWhinney and by Ninio & Wheeler. Repeated-measures ANOVA with SPSS 12.0 for windows was employed for data analyses.
Results
It was observed that there was no difference between the ASD and the ND childrenin the overall frequency of the speech acts while the frequency increased gradually in the utterances of the ND children. A significant difference was detected between the ASD and the ND children particularly with respect to pragmatic categories.
Discussion & Conclusion
It was speculated that a limited set of speech act types observed in the ASD children might be due to the lack of sensitivity to role reversals and collaborative engagement. The findings indicated that ASD children are deficient in directives and responses which require communicative ability to agree or disagree with others, direct the other’s attention, give a warning, and ask the interlocutor about his/her wish or intention, as well as taking the interlocutor’s perspective and sharing the goals collaboratively.