A Multidimensional Reappraisal of Language in Autism: Insights from a Discourse Analytic Study.

In this article, we leverage theoretical insights and methodological guidelines of discourse analytic scholarship to re-examine language phenomena typically associated with autism. Through empirical analysis of the verbal behavior of three children with autism, we engage the question of how prototypical features of autistic language-notably pronoun atypicality, pragmatic deficit, and echolalia-might conceal competencies and interactional processes that are largely invisible in mainstream research. Our findings offer a complex picture of children with autism in their use of language to communicate, interact and experience others.

Cultural context of cognitive development.

Unlabelled: The cognitive problems that children formulate and solve in their daily lives necessarily take form in a cultural context. We review and illustrate two dominant approaches to study relations between cultural context and cognitive development, and we point to the limitations and affordances of each. Using a dichotomous approach, scholars employ a methodology that sharply differentiates cognition from cultural context, treating elements of cultural context as independent variables and elements of cognition as dependent variables.

Rethinking language in autism.

In this article, we invite a rethinking of traditional perspectives of language in autism. We advocate a theoretical reappraisal that offers a corrective to the dominant and largely tacitly held view that language, in its essence, is a referential system and a reflection of the individual's cognition. Drawing on scholarship in Conversation Analysis and linguistic anthropology, we present a multidimensional view of language, showing how it also functions as interactional accomplishment, social action, and mode of experience.