Asperger Syndrome Language

This paper will examine the autism epidemic from the perspective of Quantum Medicine. It will look at individuals who have followed conventional allopathic medical approaches that focus on managing symptoms, chemically and behaviorally, to see how quantum medicine offers an effective approach to improving the outcomes of individuals with autism.

Five threads on the capacity of understanding metaphors that ran on Wrongplanet.net, a web community designed for individuals (and parents/professionals of those) with Autism, Asperger's Syndrome, ADHD, PDDs, and other neurological differences, are here integrally quoted, at the aim of highlighting how first-person descriptions given by AS adults of their competence with metaphors may contribute research.

Se revisan los conceptos de vectores de producción de sentido, propuestos por Juan Biondi y Eduardo Zapata, cuando formulan el concepto de "electronalidad". Trataremos de esbozar que estos vectores no sólo explican el funcionamiento del procesamiento de la información en el Asperger/Autismo sino que abren la posibilidad de nuevos modelos de comprensión y de intervención.

Asperger syndrome (AS) is a form of high-functioning
autism characterized by qualitative impairment in
social interaction. People afflicted with AS typically
have abnormal nonverbal behaviors which are often
manifested by avoiding eye contact. Gaze constitutes
an important interactional resource, and an AS
person’s tendency to avoid eye contact may affect the
fluidity of conversations and cause misunderstandings.
For this reason, it is important to know the
precise ways in which this avoidance is done, and in
what ways it affects the interaction. The objective of
this article is to describe the gaze behavior of preadolescent
AS children in institutional multiparty
conversations. Methodologically, the study is based
on conversation analysis and a multimodal study of
interaction.
The findings show that three main patterns are
used for avoiding eye contact: 1) fixing one’s gaze
straight ahead; 2) letting one’s gaze wander around;
and 3) looking at one’s own hands when speaking.
The informants of this study do not look at the interlocutors
at all in the beginning or the middle of
their turn. However, sometimes they turn to look at
the interlocutors at the end of their turn. This proves
that these children are able to use gaze as a source
of feedback. When listening, looking at the speaker
also seems to be easier for them than looking at the
listeners when speaking.

This paper focusses on repair sequences occurring in institutional interaction with autistic preadolescents. More precisely, the paper discusses the role of prosodic and non-verbal features in situations where the participants of interaction have difficulties understanding each other. The discussion will include analysis of the prosodic and non-verbal features of trouble-source turns that launch other-initiated repairs. Methodologically, the study falls within the framework of conversation analysis (CA). The data consist of audiovisual material recorded from group therapy sessions during which 11-to 13-year-old Finnish-speaking boys afflicted with autism talk about their lives with one another and with their therapists. The study findings suggest that certain prosodic and non-verbal features are often associated with trouble-source turns. For example, in 84% of the cases here, there is no eye contact between the speaker producing a trouble-source turn and the one who initiates the repair sequence. Sometimes the lack of eye contact is associated with overlapping speech (38%). Concerning the prosody, the most frequent feature is a creaky voice, which occurs in 35% of the trouble-source turns. A quiet voice (31%), large pitch excursions (24%), stretched syllables (18%) and jerky speech rhythms (16%) are examples of other prosodic features that could be found in the trouble-source turns of the data. The results of this study demonstrate that ASD persons' tendency to avoid direct eye contact as well as the occurrences of certain deviant prosodic features in their speech are factors that affect the fluidity of interaction and are related to the creation of understanding problems. However, only in a very few cases do non-verbal and prosodic features seem to be the main cause of the problem of understanding. The two most common causes of understanding problems in these data are overly literal interpretation of speech and topical discontinuities. The study also gives new evidence about autistic persons' pragmatic and interactional skills. Indeed, the data include passages in which the informants seem to have the ability to make certain inferences about the mental states of others. This is remarkable, because it is known that the ability in question is impaired in autism.

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.

This article highlights the advantages for researching how persons with a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (AS) perceive their capacity to understand metaphors, and why we should consider the self-descriptions they give of their competence using metaphors. To this end, the article quotes a selection of messages that were exchanged in five threads on understanding metaphors, which ran from 2007 to 2016 on Wrongplanet.net, a web community designed for individuals with Autism, Asperger Syndrome, ADHD, PDDs, and other neurological differences. Data and suggestions that can be extracted from the whole corpus of the threads are then highlighted and discussed. It is evident that self-descriptions contained in this kind of collection provide complementary material to theoretical and experimental research on the issue of metaphor competencies in Asperger Syndrome. Not only do they provide concrete evidence for claims put forward by scholars and offer new insights into research; they also question the scholarly perception that AS persons, despite their general good language competencies, characteristically have more difficulty under-standing metaphors compared to NT persons.

L’exemple d’Israël a été choisi parce qu’il s’agit d’un des premiers pays à avoir un système d’éducation spécialisée pour enfants à haut potentiel centralisé par le gouvernement. Cet article résume les pours et les contres de ce système, qui est basé sur le diagnostic de tous les élèves de 7 ou 8 ans et offre, entre autres, des programmes d’enrichissement ou des classes spéciales. Cet article indique quelques-uns des principes qui devraient être adoptés ou rejetés par tout nouveau programme éducatif destiné aux élèves à haut potentiel.

Autismiin liittyy monenlaisia sosiaalisen vuorovaikutuksen ongelmia. Tämän artikkelin lähtökohtana ovat aiemmassa tutkimuksessa tehdyt havainnot siitä, kuinka sosiaalisen vuorovaikutuksen vaikeudet näkyvät kuntoutuskeskusteluissa, joissa 11–13-vuotiaat lievästi autistiset, suomea äidinkielenään puhuvat pojat keskustelevat toistensa ja kuntouttajiensa kanssa. Keskustelunanalyysin menetelmää hyödyntäen pohdimme autististen poikien ongelmia vuorovaikutuskumppanin tulkitsemisessa, kielellisessä ja kehollisessa ilmaisussa sekä prosodiassa. Tarkastelemme yhtäältä ymmärrysongelmien ratkaisuun tähtääviä korjausjaksoja, toisaalta kuntouttajien ammatillista ja pedagogista toimintaa. Osoitamme, että samalla kun kuntouttajat pyrkivät vihjeiden avulla ylläpitämään intersubjektiivisuutta ja ratkaisemaan ymmärrysongelmia, he myös kommunikoivat ymmärrystä vuorovaikutuksen yleispätevistä normeista, joita poikien odotetaan kuntoutuksen myötä vähitellen oppivan hallitsemaan. Vuorovaikutustaitoihin liittyvä kuntouttajien opettamisorientaatio on tavallisesti implisiittistä, normaaleihin arkisen ja symmetrisen vuorovaikutuksen korjauskäytänteisiin nojaavaa toimintaa. Kuitenkin erityisesti kehollisten vuorovaikutustaitojen kohdalla kuntouttajien suuntautuminen näiden taitojen opettamiseen saatetaan joutua tekemään eksplisiittiseksi, samalla kun prosodisten taitojen opettaminen näyttäisi aineistomme perusteella pakenevan jopa eksplisiittistä opettamisorientaatiota.