Autism and Language

The iPad and other mobile technologies provide powerful new tools to potentially enhance communication for individuals with developmental disabilities, acquired neurogenic disorders, and degenerative neurological conditions. These mobile technologies offer a number of potential bene ts, including: (a) increased awareness and social acceptance of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), (b) greater consumer empowerment in accessing AAC solutions, (c) increased adoption of AAC technologies, (d) greater functionality and interconnectivity, and (e) greater diffusion of AAC research and development. However, there remain a number of signi cant challenges that must be addressed if these bene ts are to be fully realized: (a) to ensure the focus is on communication, not just technology, (b) to develop innovative models of AAC service delivery to ensure successful outcomes, (c) to ensure ease of access for all individuals who require AAC, and, (d) to maximize AAC solutions to support a wide variety of communication functions. There is an urgent need for effective collaboration among key stakeholders to support research and development activities, and to ensure the successful implementation of mobile technologies to enhance communication outcomes for individuals who require AAC and their families.

The present study aimed to find out how different stages of cortical auditory processing (sound encoding, discrimination, and orienting) are affected in children with autism. To this end, auditory event-related potentials (ERP) were studied in 15 children with autism and their controls. Their responses were recorded for pitch, duration, and vowel changes in speech stimuli, and for corresponding changes in the nonspeech counterparts of the stimuli, while the children watched silent videos and ignored the stimuli. The responses to sound repetition were diminished in amplitude in the children with autism, reflecting impaired sound encoding. The mismatch negativity (MMN), an ERP indexing sound discrimination, was enhanced in the children with autism as far as pitch changes were concerned. This is consistent with earlier studies reporting auditory hypersensitivity and good pitch-processing abilities, as well as with theories proposing enhanced perception of local stimulus features in individuals with autism. The discrimination of duration changes was impaired in these children, however. Finally, involuntary orienting to sound changes, as reflected by the P3a ERP, was more impaired for speech than non-speech sounds in the children with autism, suggesting deficits particularly in social orienting. This has been proposed to be one of the earliest symptoms to emerge, with pervasive effects on later development. D

In the 1960s and 1970s, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, operated two behaviour modification programs: one aiming to eliminate "feminine" behaviours in male-bodied children ("conversion therapy"), and one targeting autistic children's so-called problem behaviours (applied behavioural analysis or ABA). The head of the autism program referred to his work as "building a person." Decades later in Ontario, a radically incommensurate legal context sees conversion therapy banned while ABA receives millions of funding dollars. Drawing on legislation, case law, media, and clinical literature, I argue that the process of trans communities wresting themselves out from under conversion therapy involved discursively shifting from having a condition to being human - a process of "building a person" - still incomplete for autistic communities. While legal reforms protect some trans youth from harmful therapies, this does not extend to autistic trans youth, leading us to question at whose expense a rights-bearing trans person was built.

For many families, having a child with autism can be a long-term worry and involvement. Parents worry how their children will cope beyond the family home and they worry about the impact on their siblings. For parents, siblings, partners and children of people with an Autism Spectrum Condition, there are challenges which can impact on their own wellbeing. Exhaustion, stress, worry and the misunderstandings of others are some of the main issues for both autistic people and their families. Health and social care professionals are often undereducated in the impact of autism in people’s lives and this affects whether and how people with autism and their families feel about approaching services. Because autism is a hidden disability, you can't always tell if someone is autistic. People with autism and their families are often subject to stigma and discrimination, misunderstanding and criticism.
Family therapists have a great deal to bring to the world of autism. We specialize in communication, coordination, working with people’s strengths and interests. We work collaboratively with family members to find new ways of going on in our everyday relationships and co-construct a safe reflective space that can lead to change without compromising people’s identities and values.
In this chapter, we argue the case for systemic family therapy to be included in the resources offered to autistic people and their families. First, we offer some background information on autism. We discuss trends in autism theory, diagnosis, research and treatment methods and look at how autism can impact on people’s lives. Then, we introduce new systemic theory and practice for working with the impact of autism in families through sharing examples illustrating how systemic family therapy improves communication. Finally, we highlight areas for developing systemic family therapy training, practice and research on autism.

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.

Typically developing adults are able to keep track of story characters' emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these processes in autistic adults, since previous research has demonstrated socio-emotional difficulties among autistic people, which may lead to problems processing irony and its related emotional processes despite an intact ability to integrate language in context. We recorded eye movements from autistic and nonautistic adults while they read narratives in which a character (the victim) was either criticized in an ironic or a literal manner by another character (the protagonist). A target sentence then either described the victim as feeling hurt/amused by the comment, or the protagonist as having intended to hurt/amused the victim by making the comment. Results from the nonautistic adults broadly replicated the key findings from Filik et al., supporting the two-stage account. Importantly, the autistic adults did not show comparable two-stage processing of ironic language; they did not differentiate between the emotional responses for victims or protagonists following ironic versus literal criticism. These findings suggest that autistic people experience a specific difficulty taking into account other peoples' communicative intentions (i.e., infer their mental state) to appropriately anticipate emotional responses to an ironic comment. We discuss how these difficulties might link to atypical socio-emotional processing in autism, and the ability to maintain successful real-life social interactions. Autism Res 2020, 13: 563-578. Lay Summary: In line with research showing that autistic people have difficulties considering others' mental states, we found autistic adults were impaired at distinguishing the emotions and intentions experienced by story characters who received sarcastic comments (e.g., "That was fantastic parking" in a context where someone's parking was particularly bad). These findings highlight the difficulties that autistic people experience taking into account other peoples' intentions during communication to appropriately anticipate their emotional responses.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have native exposure to a sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) have received almost no scientific attention. This paper reports the first studies on a sample of five native-signing children (four deaf children of deaf parents and one hearing child of deaf parents; ages 4;6 to 7;5) diagnosed with ASD. A domain-general deficit in the ability of children with ASD to replicate the gestures of others is hypothesized to be a source of palm orientation reversal errors in sign. In Study 1, naturalistic language samples were collected from three native-signing children with ASD and were analyzed for errors in handshape, location, movement and palm orientation. In Study 2, four native-signing children with ASD were compared to 12 typically-developing deaf children (ages 3;7 to 6;9, all born to deaf parents) on a fingerspelling task. In both studies children with ASD showed a tendency to reverse palm orientation on signs specified for inward/outward orientation. Typically-developing deaf children did not produce any such errors in palm orientation. We conclude that this kind of palm reversal has a perceptual rather than a motoric source, and is further evidence of a “self-other mapping” deficit in ASD.

This article uses counter-storytelling to examine how four urban African American mothers understand and discuss the role of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in their children's education. Counter-storytelling is used as an oppositional framework to dominant stories privileged by educational systems. Findings conclude how parents posit valid critiques about CCSS and quality teaching, but reveal the absence of spaces where their voices and perspectives can be heard without marginalization. The article concludes with implications for urban education teachers, and a call of support for parents and teachers to be informed about counter-stories represented in students' education.

In order to examine the complexity of the autism memoir boom and its relation to the self-help ethos, we investigate published autie-biographies as part of a production cycle that has to negotiate between the demands of the individual’s unique story, the expectations of a community and a commercial rationale.  More precisely, we focus on Jessica Kingsley Publishers (JKP), a leading international niche publisher in the field of neurological and cognitive differences. Firstly, we study the forms and formats offered by JKP as specific technologies of writing that affect the kind of identities that could be produced. Secondly, we focus on the ‘coaxing strategies’ that are used to streamline the life writing production. We investigate how JKP contributes to the proliferation of autie-biographies as well as to the creation of what Lauren Berlant has called ‘intimate publics’. Thirdly, we focus on the oeuvre of one of JKP’s star-authors, Donna Williams. By combining textual and paratextual analysis with qualitative data from interviews we will show how Williams exemplifies the quest and triumph ethos underlying the (commercial) disability memoir, while at the same time undermines and resists the notion of progress on different levels in her work.

In 2004, a young Seattle girl with significant disabilities known only by the pseudonym Ashley X, underwent a series of medical procedures without her consent. At the request of her parents, Ashley received a mastectomy, a hysterectomy and hormonal treatment, designed to arrest her development in a childlike state. In the eyes of her doctors, her family, and their lawyers, it was urgent that Ashley's body be aligned with her purported cognitive age. The temporal and ethical arguments used to justify her 'Treatment' turned Ashley's body into a site of international debate over disability and human rights, consent and medical science, eugenics and human engineering. Yet the similarities and differences between Ashley's non-consensual pubertal arrest versus that actively sought by trans youth are rarely mentioned. This paper uses the clinical and media discourses at work in both the 'Ashley Treatment' and the treatment sought by trans youth to think through this moment in which some bodies are treated to greater forms of autonomy while other bodies have none. I argue that the discourses used to secure transition for some trans youth ought to be weighed against the implications for others, in particular for trans youth with disabilities. While the availability of puberty suppression for trans youth can be narrated as a sign that things are getting better, the literatures of queer temporality and critical disability studies help to consider that it may also augur something else—a widening gap between those invested with the ability to stop time versus those who are stopped in time.

Current views suggest that autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterised by enhanced low-level auditory discrimination abilities. Little is known, however, about whether enhanced abilities are universal in ASD and how they relate to symptomatology. We tested auditory discrimination for intensity, frequency and duration in 21 adults with ASD and 21 IQ and age-matched controls. Contrary to predictions, there were significant deficits in ASD on all acoustic parameters. The findings suggest that low-level auditory discrimination ability varies widely within ASD and this variability relates to IQ level, and influences the severity of restricted and repetitive behaviours (RRBs). We suggest that it is essential to further our understanding of the potential contributing role of sensory perception ability on the emergence of RRBs.

The aim of the current study was twofold. First, it evaluated the influence of bilingualism on syntactic abilities and verbal memory of children with High Functioning Autism (HFA). Second, it explored the relationship between syntactic abilities and verbal memory of children with HFA and typical language development (TLD). Eighty-six monolingual Hebrew-speaking and bilingual Russian-Hebrew speaking children aged 4;6-9;2 years participated: 28 with HFA (14 monolingual and 14 bilingual) and 58 with TLD (28 monolingual and 30 bilingual). Syntactic abilities were assessed using Sentence Repetition tasks (bilingual children were tested in both languages). Verbal memory was evaluated using Forward Digit Span for verbal short-term memory and Backward Digit Span for verbal working memory. As a group, children with HFA scored lower than their TLD peers on measures of syntactic abilities and verbal memory. However, some children with HFA, monolingual and bilingual, showed intact syntactic abilities, while others scored at-risk for Language Disorder (LD). Importantly, syntactic abilities in children with HFA were not associated with their verbal memory skills. Furthermore, no differences in verbal memory were found between children with HFA who were at-risk for LD and children with no risk. Bilingualism did not influence sentence repetition scores when vocabulary was controlled for, and it did not affect verbal memory scores. Our study demonstrated that (1) syntactic difficulties in children with HFA are not attributable to deficient verbal memory; moreover, (2) regardless of languages status, children with HFA at-risk for LD exhibit impaired syntax similarly to those reported in the literature for children with Developmental Language Disorder. Finally, our findings show that bilingualism affects children with TLD and HFA similarly, demonstrating that bilingualism does not impede language and cognitive development in children with HFA.

Communication deficits are a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), manifest during social interactions. Previous studies investigating communicative deficits have largely focused on the perceptual biases, social motivation, cognitive flexibility, or mentalizing abilities of isolated individuals. By embedding autistic individuals in live non-verbal interactions, we characterized a novel cause for their communication deficits. Adults with ASD matched neurotypical individuals in their ability and propensity to generate and modify intelligible behaviors for a communicative partner. However, they struggled to align the meaning of those behaviors with their partner when meaning required referencing their recent communicative history. This communicative misalignment explains why autistic individuals are vulnerable in everyday interactions, which entail fleeting ambiguities, but succeed in social cognition tests involving stereotyped contextual cues. These findings illustrate the cognitive and clinical importance of considering social interaction as a communicative alignment challenge, and how ineffective human communication is without this key interactional ingredient.

Theories of Focus Projection claim that a single pitch accent on a verb’s argument is sufficient to prosodically mark that verb as part of the focus, negating the need for a prenuclear accent on the verb itself. The present study employed on-line lexical processing to test this claim empirically. In three cross-modal associative priming experiments, listeners heard English SVO sentences with/without prenuclear accenting on the verb in both broad (VP) and narrow (object) focus contexts. Results showed that the absence of a prenuclear accent in broad focus contexts did not significantly disrupt priming, but the presence of one in narrow focus contexts did. This disruption was found to be somewhat modulated by individual differences in “autistic traits”. Overall, the findings are interpreted as supporting a model that includes both (a) a Focus Projection mechanism and (b) an information structural function for prenuclear accents, with the latter possibly subject to systematic cross-listener variation.

Autism is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social interaction , interests or body movements, and communication. Our review examines the empirical status of three communication phenomena believed to be unique to autism: pronoun reversal (using the pronoun you when the pronoun I is intended, and vice versa), echolalia (repeating what someone has said), and a reduced or even reversed production-comprehension lag (a reduction or reversal of the well-established finding that speakers produce less sophisticated language than they can comprehend). Each of these three phenomena has been claimed to be unique to autism; therefore, each has been proposed to be diagnostic of autism, and each has been interpreted in autism-centric ways (psychoanalytic interpretations of pronoun reversal, be-haviorist interpretations of echolalia, and clinical lore about the production-comprehension lag). However, as our review demonstrates, none of these three phenomena is in fact unique to autism; none can or should serve as diagnostic of autism, and all call into question unwarranted assumptions about autistic persons and their language development and use.

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 chapter presents two experiments utilizing prosodic adaptations of the structural priming paradigm. In each experiment, the goal was to explore the relation between the location of a prosodic boundary and the preferred parsing of a relative clause (RC) with ambiguous attachment to a preceding head noun. In Experiment 1, using read materials, ambiguous target sentences were preceded by prime sentences with RCs of different length: long, medium, and short. RC length was hypothesized to influence the location of an implicit boundary in the primes. However, no effect for this RC-length manipulation was found. In Experiment 2, the location of a boundary was manipulated in overt (spoken) prime sentences. For these auditorily-presented primes, the location of a prosodic boundary was found to influence attachment preference for targets. Interestingly, the effect was in the opposite direction as predicted: In the configuration NP1 NP2 RC, a boundary after NP2 resulted in more NP2 attachments. The authors propose that in the experimental materials, which contained equivalent accents on the two neuter pronouns (NPs), the boundary after NP2 leads to the accent on NP2 being interpreted as the nuclear pitch accent. Consequently, that accent was perceived as being stronger than the accent on NP1, thus attracting the RC. The results suggest a close relationship between prosodic phrasing and prosodic prominence in English, and demonstrate a role for both in sentence processing.

We have developed a system for automatic facial expression recognition running on Google Glass, delivering real-time social cues to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The system includes multiple mechanisms to engage children and their parents, who administer this technology within the home. We completed an at-home design trial with 14 families that used the learning aid over a 3-month period. We found that children with ASD generally respond well to wearing the system at home and opt for the most expressive feedback choice. We further evaluated app usage, facial engagement, and model accuracy. We found that the device can act as a powerful training aid when used periodically in the home, that interactive video content from wearable therapy sessions should be augmented with sufficient context about the content to produce long-term engagement, and that the design of wearable systems for children with ASD should be heavily dependent on the functioning level of the child. We contribute general design implications for developing wearable aids used by children with ASD and other behavioral disorders as well as their parents during at-home parent-administered therapy sessions.

Using the structural priming paradigm, the present study explores predictions made by the implicit prosody hypothesis
(IPH) by testing whether an implicit prosodic boundary generated from a silently read sentence influences attachment
preference for a novel, subsequently read sentence. Results indicate that such priming does occur, as evidenced by an effect on relative clause attachment. In particular, priming an implicit boundary directly before a relative clause– cued by commas in orthography – encouraged high attachment of that relative clause, although the size of the effect depended somewhat on individual differences in pragmatic/communication skills (as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient). Thus, in addition to supporting the basic claims of the IPH, the present study demonstrates the relevance of such individual differences to sentence processing, and that implicit prosodic structure, like syntactic structure, can be primed.

This study investigates effects of syntactic complexity operationalised in terms of movement, intervention and (NP) feature similarity in the development of A’ dependencies in 4-, 6-, and 8-year old typically developing (TD) French children and children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Children completed an off-line comprehension task testing eight syntactic structures classified in four levels of complexity: Level 0: No Movement; Level 1: Movement without (configurational) Intervention; Level 2: Movement with Intervention from an element which is maximally different or featurally ‘disjoint’ (mismatched in both lexical NP restriction and number); Level 3: Movement with Intervention from an element similar in one feature or featurally ‘intersecting’ (matched in lexical NP restriction, mismatched in number). The results show that syntactic complexity affects TD children across the three age groups, but also indicate developmental differences between these groups. Movement affected all three groups in a similar way, but intervention effects in intersection cases were stronger in younger than older children, with NP feature similarity affecting only 4-year olds. Complexity effects created by the similarity in lexical restriction of an intervener thus appear to be overcome early in development, arguably thanks to other differences of this intervener (which was mismatched in number). Children with ASD performed less well than the TD children although they were matched on non-verbal reasoning. Overall, syntactic complexity affected their performance in a similar way as in their TD controls, but their performance correlated with non-verbal abilities rather than age, suggesting that their grammatical development does not follow the smooth relation to age that is found in TD children.

Through the lens of a case study of the spontaneous verbal interaction of a five-year-and-ten-month-old child with autism, this article offers a reflection on the psychological and epistemological underpinnings of human communication. In particular, in the analysis of verbal exchanges between a child with autism and his caregivers, we discuss formulaic talk and verbal play and the relation of these with sequential progressivity, expressions of personal stance, and intersubjectivity. The analysis allows us to unearth the inherent precariousness and unpredictability of communication and how it is perpetually vulnerable to failure. We suggest that the intrinsic risk of breakdown in intersubjectivity cannot be conceived of as a threat to successful communication, but rather, as an attribute of sequence progressivity and an essential component of communication as encounter with the other, grounded on mutual trust. [autism, intersubjectivity, sequence progressivity, trust]

The anxiety and autism realms are each complicated and heterogeneous, and relationships between the two areas are especially complex. Network analysis offers a promising approach to the phenotypic complexities of typical and atypical human behavior. The Revised Children's Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) was used to assess anxiety in 126 high-functioning 9-13 year-olds with ASDs. Network graphs of Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule items and RCADS anxiety total score, social, generalized, panic and separation anxiety subscores consistently found the anxiety node (score) to be highly peripheral. Also, the networks of RCADS anxiety items themselves were similar for the ASDs group and a general population comparison group (n = 2017). The results suggest anxiety is not a central part of autism and that anxiety is dynamically similar (aspects of anxiety relate to one another in a similar manner) in high-functioning autism and the general population.

This paper argues that positing a Theory of Mind and mind-reading abilities in particular is necessary in order to be able to account for the development and possible impairments of communication in normally developing children and individuals with autism. To account for the different impairments that people diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit, what is needed is a refinement of the levels or degrees of mind-reading abilities that are usually posited in the literature. Instead of the two-tiered system of first-and second-order mind-reading abilities, there is a need to propose several other layers of meta-representation to account for the comprehension of different communicative events, such as metaphors, under-and overstatements, direct and indirect speech acts, lies, deceits, humour, jokes, irony and sarcasm. This paper assumes a relevance-theoretic perspective to explain deficits in communicative abilities in individuals with ASD. It suggests that the pragmatic impairments specific to autism can be accounted for by the role of context retrieval in the comprehension and production process, especially those related to knowledge about the speaker. Language is the basis of what makes us human in terms of the cognitive, social, psychological, as well as cultural 'make-up' of humankind. Children face an enormous task in acquiring language—a feat that is only appreciated when one looks closely at what is involved in the task. The basics of the language system (phonology, morphology and syntax) are acquired within the first four to five years. However, knowledge of the underlying system (competence) is not sufficient for what language is essentially used for:

Notwithstanding recent work which has demonstrated the potential of using Twitter messages for content-specific data mining and analysis, the depth of such analysis is inherently limited by the scarcity of data imposed by the 140 character tweet limit. In this paper we describe a novel approach for targeted knowledge exploration which uses tweet content analysis as a preliminary step. This step is used to bootstrap more sophisticated data collection from directly related but much richer content sources. In particular we demonstrate that valuable information can be collected by following URLs included in tweets. We automatically extract content from the corresponding web pages and treating each web page as a document linked to the original tweet show how a temporal topic model based on a hierarchical Dirichlet process can be used to track the evolution of a complex topic structure of a Twitter community. Using autism-related tweets we demonstrate that our method is capable of capturing a much more meaningful picture of information exchange than user-chosen hashtags.

This study examines two complex syntactic dependencies (complement control and sentence-final temporal adjunct control) and one pragmatic dependency (controlled verbal gerund subjects) in children with ASD. Sixteen high-functioning (HFA) children (aged 6–16) with a diagnosis of autism and no language impairment, matched on age, gender and non-verbal MA to one TD control group, and on age, gender and verbal MA to another TD control group, undertook three picture-selection tasks. Task 1 measured their base-line interpretations of the empty categories (ec). Task 2 preceded these sentence sets with a weakly established topic cueing an alternative referent and Task 3 with a strongly established topic cueing an alternative referent. In complement control (Ron persuaded Hermione ec to kick the ball) and sentence-final temporal adjunct control (Harry tapped Luna while ec feeding the owl), the reference of the ec is argued to be related obligatorily to the object and subject respectively. In controlled verbal-gerund subjects (VGS) (ec Rowing the boat clumsily made Luna seasick), the ec's reference is resolved pragmatically. Referent choices across the three tasks were compared. TD children chose the object uniformly in complement control across all tasks but in adjunct control, preferences shifted toward the object in Task 3. In controlled VGSs, they exhibited a strong preference for an internal-referent interpretation in Task 1, which shifted in the direction of the cues in Tasks 2 and 3. HFA children gave a mixed performance. They patterned with their TD counterparts on complement control and controlled VGSs but performed marginally differently on adjunct control: no TD groups were influenced by the weakly established topic in Task 2 but all groups were influenced by the strongly established topic in Task 3. HFA children were less influenced than the TD children, resulting in their making fewer object choices overall but revealing parallel patterns of performance. In this first study of three sub-types of control in ASD, we demonstrate that HFA children consult the same pragmatic cues to the same degree as TD children, in spite of the diverse pragmatic deficits reported for this population.

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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.

We compared the patterns of affiliative and dominant behavior displayed in male dyads where one participant has Asperger's syndrome (AS) with those displayed in male dyads with two neurotypical (NT) participants. Drawing on interpersonal theory, according to which affiliation and dominance constitute two orthogonal axes of the " interpersonal circle, " we used a computer-joystick apparatus to assess the participants' moment-to-moment affiliative and dominant behaviors throughout conversation. The patterns of affiliation and dominance were subsequently studied in relation to post-conversation questionnaires that targeted the interactional experiences of the participants in the two different types of dyads (AS dyads, NT dyads). We found the overall interpersonal notion of complementarity to hold for AS and NT dyads alike: greater affiliation in one participant invoked greater affiliation in the co-participant, and greater dominance invoked greater submissiveness in the co-participant. The AS and NT dyads, however, differed with regard to how affiliative and dominant behaviors related to each other during the time course of a single conversation. Furthermore, we found important differences between the AS and NT dyads in how the different patterns of affiliation and dominance were experienced by the participants. For example, a high level of affiliation synchrony was experienced in more negative terms by the participants in the AS dyads than by those in the NT dyads, while a high level of dominance coordination was experienced in more positive terms by the participants in the AS dyads than by those in the NT dyads. The paper increases understanding of the details of the interactional deficits associated with AS and of the conditions in which AS participants may get maximally positive interactional experiences. More generally, our study highlights the necessity to take the study of individual differences in the experiences of patterns of affiliation and dominance into the official agenda of empirical interaction research.

Background: Procedures that reduce errors while learning a repertoire play an important role in Applied Behavior Analysis for people with autism due to the detrimental effects that excessive exposure to error may have on learning. Previous studies have investigated the effects of correction procedures that require active student response after a trial with error. Some intervention manuals recommend against reinforcing responses after correction to prevent the establishment of prompt dependence. This study directly investigated the effect of reinforcement after an active-response correction procedure during tact training in four children with autism. An echoic-to-tact training procedure was used to train tacts. A "no reinforcement after correction" (NRC) condition was compared to a "reinforcement after correction" (RC) condition, using an adapted alternated treatments design. Results: All participants needed less correction trials in RC than in NRC, and considering all 26 sessions in which both training procedures were implemented, participants' performance was higher with RC than without in 17 sessions and was the same in 3 sessions. Conclusions: We discuss the effectiveness of reinforcing correct responding after an active-response correction procedure, the absence of prompt dependence, and the implications of better correction procedures for applied settings.

Abstract
Some people with autism spectrum disorders have been observed to experience difficulties with making correct
inferences in conversations in social situations. However, the nature and origin of their problem is rarely investigated.
This study used manipulations of video stimuli to investigate two questions. The first question was whether it is the
number of people involved in social situations, that is, the source of problems in following conversations, or whether
it is the increased mentalising demands required to comprehend interactions between several people. The second
question asked was whether the nature and pattern of the errors that autism spectrum disorder participants show
are the same as typically developing people make when they make an error. In total, 43 typically developed adults and
30 adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder were studied. We found that it was the amount of mentalising
required, rather than the number of people involved, which caused problems for people with autism spectrum disorder
in following conversations. Furthermore, the autism spectrum disorder participants showed a more heterogeneous
pattern of errors, showing less agreement among themselves than the typically developed group as to which test items
were hardest. So, fully understanding the observed behaviour consequent upon weakness in mentalising ability in people
with autism spectrum disorders requires consideration of factors other than mentalising.

The autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is increasingly being recognized as a major public health issue which affects approximately 0.5-0.6% of the population. Promoting the general awareness of the disorder, increasing the engagement with the affected individuals and their carers, and understanding the success of penetration of the current clinical recommendations in the target communities, is crucial in driving research as well as policy. The aim of the present work is to investigate if Twitter, as a highly popular platform for information exchange, can be used as a data-mining source which could aid in the aforementioned challenges. Specifically, using a large data set of harvested tweets, we present a series of experiments which examine a range of linguistic and semantic aspects of messages posted by individuals interested in ASD. Our findings, the first of their nature in the published scientific literature, strongly motivate additional research on this topic and present a methodological basis for further work.

This paper analyses disfluencies and ungrammatical expressions in the speech of 11-13-year-old Finnish-speaking boys with ASD (N = 5) and with neurotypical development (N = 6). The ASD data were from authentic group therapy sessions and neurotypical data from teacher-led group discussions. The proportion of disfluencies and ungrammatical expressions was greater in the speech of participants with ASD (26.4%) than in the control group (15.5%). Furthermore, a qualitative difference was noted: The ASD group produced long, complex disfluent turns with word searches, self-repairs, false starts, fillers, prolongations, inconsistent syntactic structures and grammatical errors, whereas in the control group, the disfluencies were mainly fillers and sound prolongations. The disfluencies and ungrammatical expressions occurring in the ASD participants' interactions also caused comprehension problems.

We investigated whether there is an association between autistic traits in the broader phenotype and the ability to compute scalar implicatures. Previous studies found that the frequency of autistic traits is higher in students of science than of humanities. Here we recorded the frequency of rejection of underinformative scalar items in students enrolled either in a science or in a humanities curriculum and assessed their autistic traits using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient questionnaire. We found that rejections were less frequent in science curricula students than in humanities curricula students. Moreover, rejections were associated negatively with autistic traits and positively with performance on Theory-of-Mind tasks. These findings suggest that autism cognitive phenotype is negatively associated with a propensity to spontaneously derive scalar implicatures.

Purpose: This study aimed to analyze prosodic elements of speech segments of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and compare with the control group, using an acoustic analysis. Methods: Speech recordings were performed with a sample of individuals with ASD (n = 19) and with typical development (n = 19) of the male gender, age range: 8-33 years. The prosody questionnaire ALIB (Brazilian Linguistic Atlas) was used as script, which contains interrogative, affirmative and imperative sentences. Data were analyzed using the PRAAT software and forwarded to statistical analysis in order to verify possible significant differences between the two groups studied in each prosodic parameter evaluated (fundamental frequency, intensity and duration) and its respective variables. Results: There were significant differences for the variables tessitura, melodic amplitude of tonic vowel, melodic amplitude of pretonic vowel, maximum intensity, minimum intensity, tonic vowel duration, pretonic vowel duration and phrase duration. Conclusion: Individuals with ASD present significant differences in prosody compared to those with typical development. It is noteworthy, however, the necessity of additional studies on the characterization of prosodic aspects of speech of individuals with ASD with a larger sample and a more restricted age group. RESUMO Objetivo: Analisar elementos prosódicos de segmentos da fala de escolares com transtorno do espectro autista (TEA) e comparar com grupo controle, por meio de uma análise acústica. Método: Foram realizadas gravações da fala de uma amostra de indivíduos com TEA (n=19) e com desenvolvimento típico (n=19) do gênero masculino, intervalo: 8-33 anos. Para coleta de dados, utilizou-se como roteiro o questionário de prosódia do ALiB (Atlas Linguístico Brasileiro), que contém frases interrogativas, afirmativas e imperativas. Os dados obtidos foram analisados por meio do software PRAAT e encaminhados para tratamento estatístico com o intuito de verificar possíveis diferenças estatisticamente significantes entre os dois grupos estudados em cada parâmetro prosódico avaliado (frequência fundamental, intensidade e duração) e suas respectivas variáveis. Resultados: Verificou-se que houve diferenças significantes para as variáveis tessitura, amplitude melódica de vogal tônica, amplitude melódica de vogal pretônica, intensidade máxima, intensidade mínima, duração de vogal tônica, duração de vogal pretônica e duração de enunciado. Conclusão: Indivíduos com TEA apresentam diferenças marcantes na prosódia em comparação aos com desenvolvimento típico. Ressalta-se, no entanto, a necessidade de mais estudos sobre a caracterização de aspectos prosódicos da fala de indivíduos com TEA com uma amostragem maior e faixa etária mais restrita.

Building on the notational principles of C. S. Peirce’s graphical logic, Pietarinen has tried to develop a propositional logic unfolding in the medium of sound. Apart from its intrinsic interest, this project serves as a concrete test of logic’s range. However, I argue that Pietarinen’s inaugural proposal, while promising, has an important shortcoming, since it cannot portray double-negation without thereby portraying a contradiction.

This paper presents our investigation of the ability of 33 readability indices to account for the reading comprehension difficulty posed by texts for people with autism. The evaluation by autistic readers of 16 text passages is described, a process which led to the production of the first text collection for which readability has been evaluated by people with autism. We present the findings of a study to determine which of the 33 indices can successfully discriminate between the difficulty levels of the text passages, as determined by our reading experiment involving autistic participants. The discriminatory power of the indices is further assessed through their application to the FIRST corpus which consists of 25 texts presented in their original form and in a manually simplified form (50 texts in total), produced specifically for readers with autism.

The new definition of EBM or 'evidence based medicine' that would help make the 'paradigm-shift' in autism towards applying the solution(s) and seeing the results is - including and accepting the individual case-reports of "healed" cases of autism on an case to case basis as presented as the evidence of the individual with autism being free from the limiting symptoms of autism (symptoms defined or described as "limiting" by the individual with the particular symptoms) due to any method or intervention that that individual used/applied.
Therefore, the re-defining of EBM in autism is of urgent and
immediate importance and significance as that would open the path to more and more cases of "autism healing"/ autism "solutions" coming to light from all over the world.
This would be the way forward in ensuring a global awakening
towards experiencing the healing in autism instead of
struggling needlessly, in many cases,with the debilitating symptoms of autism.
The time to make that paradigm-shift from the problem to the solution in autism is now.

Children with autism may have
difficulties forming and maintaining
meaningful relationships with their
peers (Reichow & Volkmar, 2009). These
difficulties can lead to social isolation
(Delaney & Madigan, 2009 as cited in
Clapham, Armitano, Lamont & Audette,
2014) and can impact their social,
emotional and cognitive development;
academic achievements (Stichter, Randolph,
Gage, & Schmidt, 2007 as cited
in Cavanuagh & Rademacher, 2014);
and, self-esteem (Chamberlain, Kasari,
& Rotheram-Fuller, 2007 as cited in Cavanaugh,
Rademacher, S., Rademacher,
J., & Simons, 2013). Thus, it is important
to have children with autism involved in
interventions that utilize the proper techniques
to effectively teach social skills,
such as therapeutic surfing camps.

This dissertation represents the first systematic study of the sign language of deaf children with autism. The signing of such children is of particular interest because of the unique ways that some of the known impairments of autism are likely to interact with sign language. In particular, the visual-spatial modality of sign requires signers to understand the visual perspectives of others, a skill which may require theory of mind, which is thought to be delayed in autism (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). It is hypothesized that an impairment in visual perspective-taking could lead to phonological errors in American Sign Language (ASL), specifically in the parameters of palm orientation, movement, and location.
Twenty-five deaf children and adolescents with autism (10 deaf-of-deaf and 15 deaf-of-hearing) between the ages of 4;7 and 20;3 as well as a control group of 13 typically-developing deaf-of-deaf children between the ages of 2;7 and 6;9 were observed in a series of studies, including naturalistic observation, lexical elicitation, fingerspelling, imitation of nonsense gestures, two visual perspective-taking tasks, and a novel sign learning task. The imitation task was also performed on a control group of 24 hearing, non-signing college students. Finally, four deaf mothers of deaf autistic children were interviewed about their children’s signing. Results showed that young deaf-of-deaf autistic children under the age of 10 are prone to making phonological errors involving the palm orientation parameter, substituting an inward palm for an outward palm and vice versa. There is very little evidence that such errors occur in the typical acquisition of ASL or any other sign language. These results indicate that deaf children with autism are impaired from an early age in a cognitive mechanism involved in the acquisition of sign language phonology, though it remains unclear which mechanism(s) might be responsible. This research demonstrates the importance of sign language research for a more complete understanding of autism, as well as the need for research into atypical populations for a better understanding of sign language linguistics.

The own name is a salient stimulus, used by others to initiate social interaction. Typically developing infants orient towards the sound of their own name and exhibit enhanced event-related potentials (ERP) at 5 months. The lack of orientation to the own name is considered to be one of the earliest signs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this study, we investigated ERPs to hearing the own name in infants at high and low risk for ASD, at 10 and 14 months. We hypothesized that low-risk infants would exhibit enhanced frontal ERP responses to their own name compared to an unfamiliar name, while high-risk infants were expected to show attenuation or absence of this difference in their ERP responses. In contrast to expectations, we did not find enhanced ERPs to own name in the low-risk group. However, the high-risk group exhibited attenuated frontal positive-going activity to their own name compared to an unfamiliar name and compared to the low-risk group, at the age of 14 months. These results suggest that infants at high risk for ASD start to process their own name differently shortly after one year of age, a period when frontal brain development is happening at a fast rate.

The main points to be developed in this chapter are the following:

• Pragmatic competence is not a homogeneous thing, but manifests itself in the ability to deal with a broad variety of tasks, including disambiguation, establishing coherence, interpreting metaphors, and much more.
• Pragmatic deficiencies observed in people with autism are not equally severe across all these sub-tasks.
• Contrary to the widely held view that mind reading is essential to pragmatics, it is unclear whether mind reading is always involved in pragmatic reasoning, nor is it even clear how important it really is. Hence, as things currently stand, it is only a hypothesis that pragmatic deficits in autism are largely due to mind-reading deficits.
• At least some of the data that have been claimed to provide support for this hypothesis are better explained in terms of executive function deficits, which are frequently associated with ASD.

Previous studies report prolonged auditory brainstem response (ABR) in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite its promise as a biomarker, it is unclear whether healthy newborns who later develop ASD also show ABR abnormalities. In the current study, we extracted ABR data on 139,154 newborns from their Universal Newborn Hearing Screening, including 321 newborns who were later diagnosed with ASD. We found that the ASD newborns had significant prolongations of their ABR phase and V-negative latency compared with the non-ASD newborns. Newborns in the ASD group also exhibited greater variance in their latencies compared to previous studies in older ASD samples, likely due in part to the low intensity of the ABR stimulus. These findings suggest that newborns display neurophysiologi-cal variation associated with ASD at birth. Future studies with higher-intensity stimulus ABRs may allow more accurate predictions of ASD risk, which could augment the universal ABR test that currently screens millions of newborns worldwide. Autism Res 2020, 00: 1-7. Lay Summary: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have slow brain responses to sounds. We examined these brain responses from newborns' hearing tests and found that newborns who were later diagnosed with autism also had slower brain responses to sounds. Future studies might use these findings to better predict autism risk, with a hearing test that is already used on millions of newborns worldwide.

Aim: A substantial proportion of children and young people with autism demonstrate accurate word reading but struggle to understand the content of what they are reading. There is an urgent need for further research in this area to enable educational professionals to implement evidence-based reading interventions. Method/Rationale: This study analyses the effectiveness of an intervention designed to improve the reading comprehension of young people with autism and reading comprehension difficulties (mean age 13 years, 6 months). The intervention was delivered twice a week over a period of six weeks. Findings: The results indicate that the intervention group (N=15) demonstrated a significantly greater increase in their reading comprehension than a 'treatment as usual' control group (N=14), showing an average of three years' improvement in their reading comprehension. Semi-structured interviews with participants indicated that many demonstrated a shift in their approach to reading, with a greater focus on comprehension and an awareness of transferring the skills they had learnt to other areas of the curriculum. Participants also identified that the intervention supported their speaking and listening skills. Limitations: The small size of the sample in this study limits the generalisation of the findings. The robustness of the findings would be increased by including long-term outcome measures. Conclusions: These findings present important implications for professionals working with young people and suggest that school-based reading interventions may be effective at developing the reading comprehension of individuals with autism.

While research on autism has sometimes focused on special talents or abilities, autism is typically characterized as impoverished or defective when it comes to language. Autistic Disturbances reveals the ways interpreters have failed to register the real creative valence of autistic language and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive aesthetics of autistic rhetoric and semiotics. Reinterpreting characteristic autistic verbal practices such as repetition in the context of a more widely respected literary canon, Julia Miele Rodas argues that autistic language is actually an essential part of mainstream literary aesthetics, visible in poetry by Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, in novels by Charlotte Brontë and Daniel Defoe, in life writing by Andy Warhol, and even in writing by figures from popular culture.

REVIEWS

Los Angeles Review of Books, Travis Chi Wing Lau, 2 May 2019
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-poetics-of-autism/#!

Thinking Person's Guide to Autism, Maxfield Sparrow, 13 Jan 2019
http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2019/01/autistic-disturbances-review.html

Wordgathering, Michael Northen, 2018
http://www.wordgathering.com/past_issues/issue47/reviews/rodas.html

In recent times, there have been reports of the use of “Medical
Marijuana” and Cannabis in helping to gain relief from the symptoms in autism .Нis editorial seeks to present the facts about the underlying mechanism of what brings about the eوٴect of the “improvements”,although temporary in most cases, that have been reported where either the parents of a child with autism or the child / person with autism has used or has been administered cannabis in one form or the other. Read More ...

A 17 year old boy diagnosed as a case of Autism became completely independent and free from all the limiting symptoms of autism that he had been suffering from since the age of 2 years and started earning on his own for the first time in his life after undergoing 20 Remote Healing sessions using the cutting-edge science of Applied Intentional Epigenetics with Intent Healing (TM). INTRODUCTION The biggest worry for all parents with children diagnosed with Autism or ASD is about the " future " of their child. This concern specifically includes the nagging doubt whether their child would be able to survive independently or they would need to plan for institutional care for their child. With 1 in 68 children being diagnosed with autism, the prevalence of children on the spectrum who grow into adulthood without being able to manage even their basic needs independently is on the increase. Added to this is the prevailing erroneous notion that there is no known effective " scientific " cure for the debilitating symptoms in autism. I present here a case of a 17 year old adolescent with autism who had been completely dependent on his parents even for completing the basic tasks of survival on a daily basis, for 17 years of his life and was healed by me operating in the newly emerging scientific discipline of Applied Intentional Epigenetics, using the cutting edge Intent Healing (TM) Remote Healing method, following which all his limiting

In recent years, much focus has been put on employing technology to make novel behavioral aids for those with autism. Most of these are digital adaptations of tools used in standard behavioral therapy to enforce normative skills. These digital counterparts are often used outside of both the larger therapeutic context and the real world, in which the learned skills might apply. To address this, we are designing a system of automatic expression recognition on wearable devices that integrates directly into the families' daily social interactions, to give children and their caregivers the tools and information they need to design their own holistic therapy. In order to develop a tool that will be truly useful to families, we proactively include children with autism and their families as co-designers in the development process. By providing an app and interface with interchangeable social feedback options, we aim to produce a framework for therapy that folds into their daily lives, tailored to their specific needs.