A Study on the Discourse of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders at the Early Stage of Language Development

Jo, Seong Sook

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2002;7(3): 55-76.

Seong Sook Jo^`

조성숙(Seong Sook Jo)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to identify differences in discourse behaviors between children with autism spectrum disorder and normally developing children at the early language developmental stage. The research method included observation of the communicative behaviors of 8 Korean children with autism spectrum disorder and 8 normally developing Korean children (13 months - 24 months). A set of activity tasks was designed to observe children’s communicative behaviors face-to-face. Each obser- vation session lasted for 30 minutes, once a week for three weeks. The results of the present study were as follow: (1) In discourse turn-takings, adjacent utterances were more frequently observed than non-adjacent utterances in the group of normal children, the frequency increasing with the passage of time. The same tendency of increase of the adjacent utterances was also found in the autistic children, albeit with less numbers than those of the normal children. With respect to the topic-relatedness of the adjacent utterances, the frequency of topic-related responses increased with time for both normal and autistic children. (3) In terms of topic maintenance, both groups used more of the non-informative, non-adding information more than the informative, adding information. However, the normal children gradually gained the ability to add new information, whereas the autistic children hardly did.