Assessing socially situated participation: a way of integrating communication and social assessment approaches.

We have long treated communication and social assessment as related but separate domains. Theorizing by George Herbert Mead on "the social self" offers an alternative to this conceptual separation and a means of evaluating children's social interaction, social participation, and communication simultaneously. This article describes Mead's thinking and presents a framework for assessing children's social reciprocity, interactive stances, and role participation as they participate in everyday life contexts.

Describing the unusual behavior of children with autism.

The behaviors of children with autism have been described by professionals, by family members, and also by those with autism. This article analyzes four different types of reports that contain descriptions of those with autism: (1) case studies, (2) diagnostic reports and single-subject research studies, (3) family accounts, and (4) autobiographical descriptions. Authors describe the behaviors of those with autism differently depending upon their relationship with the person they are describing, their intended audience, their goals, and the genre they use for conveying their descriptions. Authors were found to use the following types of descriptions, to varying degrees in order to achieve their goals: (1) descriptions of what a child did on a particular occasion; (2) descriptions of what a child typically does or did; (3) descriptions of what a child should have done; (4) descriptions of how behavior was experienced by a child or family member; (5) descriptions of how a third party reported a behavior; (6) metaphoric descriptions of behaviors; and (7) descriptions of how behaviors mesh with traits often associated with autism. A detailed examination of how behaviors of children with autism are described indicates that the way someone with autism is regarded and described is strongly related to what the describer wants to accomplish.

Successful use of facilitated communication with an oral child.

A 6 1/2-year-old child's oral and spelled utterances were compared over a 3-month period as he was trained to use Facilitated Communication (FC), a method of augmentative and alternative communication. The child's language with FC was significantly better than his oral language in length of utterances, novelty of utterances, and syntactic complexity. His language with FC also contained more function words and over time was more intelligible and required less verbal scaffolding than his oral communication. Evidence that he was authoring his own messages during his facilitated spelling was found in his idiosyncratic use of language and his ability to convey verifiable information that was unknown to the facilitator. The strongest evidence came later with his ability to type messages without physical support. The results suggest the potential for using FC with children who have some functional oral skills but cannot express themselves fully in the oral modality. The method can serve as a means of investigating language potential and as a transition to literacy and independent typed communication.

Issues raised by facilitated communication for theorizing and research on autism.

There is considerable disagreement in the literature and among clinicians about the success of facilitated communication, a new method of augmentative communication being used with people diagnosed autistic. Some claim almost everyone exposed to it achieves success, basing their claims upon their observations and experiences of naturally occurring facilitated interactions. Others claim minimal or no success, basing their claims on their observations of facilitated interactions under controlled experimental conditions. I argue here that both claims can be valid and that FC users with autism are sometimes competent and other times incompetent, depending upon the conditions under which they are evaluated. I support my argument by offering a collaborative view of communication in place of the commonly held view that communication involves passing messages over an invisible conduit. Given the assumption that facilitated communication does allow for the expression of unexpected competence for many with autism, I describe various unusual phenomena being revealed by facilitation and FC users and offer some theoretical approaches for explaining these phenomena. I then propose some research ideas for studying the phenomena associated with FC and offer them as suggestions for how we might proceed in our efforts to develop our understanding of when and how it works for people with autism.

Then as an indicator of deictic discontinuity in adults' oral descriptions of a film.

An analysis of film descriptions of 20 normal-language adults revealed the adults' selective and systematic use of the word then. Then served to indicate an upcoming shift in discourse deixis. It occurred in clauses that told of a shift to a different discourse frame (conversation vs. story world of the film), to a new scene location, to a different character, and a shift in who was doing the viewing. The regularity in the use of then is taken to be evidence that speakers conceptualize their descriptions as being located in a variety of related frames, all having to do with the perspective taken on the current talk. A conceptual model underlying the speakers' use of then would need to include distinctions between the conversational and story world, the various scenes in the objective world of the story, and various subjective views that different observers can have when experiencing the described events. The results are taken as support for viewing discourse discontinuity as an important factor in discourse analysis.

The functions of immediate echolalia in autistic children.

This research was intended to discover how immediate echolalia functioned for autistic children in interactions with familial adults. For echolalic children were videotaped at school and at home, in both group and dyadic interactions in natural situations such as lunchtime, family activities, and play activities in school. After conducting a multilevel analysis (of over 1,000 utterances) of verbal and nonverbal factors, response latency, and intonation, it was discovered that immediate echolalia is far more than a meaningless behavior, as has been previously reported. Seven functional categories of echolalia were discovered and are discussed in reference to behavioral and linguistic features of each category. It is argue that researchers who propose intervention programs of ech-abatement may be overlooking the important communicative and cognitive functions echolalia may serve for the autistic child.

Normal and retarded children's understanding of semantic relations in different verbal contexts.

The effect of different semantic relations presented in different verbal contexts to language retarded and normal children at the one-and two-word stage of development was studied. No significant difference was found between the performance of mentally retarded language-disordered and normal children on the verbal comprehension task. Both groups of children performed best on the possessive, next on the agent-object, then actor-action, and poorest on the locative relations. Finally, nonsense, telegraphic, and expanded contexts did make a difference in the children's understandings with expanded being the best, telegraphic next, and nonsense contexts poorest. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.