INTERACTIONS OF CHILDREN WITH SEVERE AUTISM

Background: Investigating autism in severe cases is fraught with practical difficulties, which has resulted in a literature that tends to focus on high functioning autism. To fully understand autism it is essential that severe autism is also considered. The methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA) has the potential to further our understanding of severe autism as it emphasises interaction as a mutual accomplishment, meaning that it can provide a powerful framework for the analysis of talk when the language abilities of one or more of the participants is compromised.

Objectives: To demonstrate how the methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA) may be usefully employed to investigate interactions of severely autistic children.

Methods: Nine hours of video was obtained from eleven severely autistic children with a CARS score of 37+. The children were filmed engaging in naturally occurring interactions, both at home and at a special school for children with severe learning difficulties. The video material included therapy, teaching sessions and mother-child interactions. From this data a corpus of requests was isolated, transcribed and analysed using CA methodology.

Results: Children were capable of interacting skillfully with their co-participants and despite profound difficulties with speech and language were able to initiate requests. The analysis demonstrated the importance of shared knowledge between the child and their co-interactant which enabled requests to be mutually understood and accomplished.

Conclusions: This study serves as a reminder that the interactional competencies of severely autistic children can be underestimated. The analysis of the children’s interaction, showed for example that they were able to design requests to take into account co-participants’ shared knowledge. These competencies raise questions about the nature of the deficits involved in autism. CA has the potential to clarify how the deficits considered central to autism are reflected in the everyday talk-in-interaction of ‘low functioning’ individuals.