The interplay between social and linguistic knowledge in perspective-taking by autistic children.
Item
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Title
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The interplay between social and linguistic knowledge in perspective-taking by autistic children.
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Identifier
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AAI9000695
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identifier
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9000695
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Creator
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Geller, Elaine Fleisher.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Margaret Lahey
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Date
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1989
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Health Sciences, Speech Pathology
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Abstract
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The primary purpose of this investigation was to explore dimensions of social-cognitive knowledge in verbal autistic children. Specifically, linguistic (deixis and presuppositions) and non-linguistic (perceptual) perspective-taking skills of five school-aged autistic children were studied. The children were studied in a range of communicative contexts which included modifications in the listener (i.e., naive versus knowledgeable), physical-perceptual (i.e., presence and absence of physical supports) and linguistic context.;The children selected for this study were verbal autistic children whose MLUs were beyond 3.0 morphemes and who evidenced non-verbal cognitive skills within borderline to normal limits.;The results of this study revealed that the autistic children exhibited varying degrees of competence in aspects of linguistic and non-linguistic (perceptual) perspective-taking performance.;In terms of linguistic perspective-taking, the autistic children produced a range of person, object and place deictic categories. All children demonstrated the ability to clearly code non-contrastive and contrastive person deictic forms and non-contrastive object and place deictic forms. The children's communicative deictic performance reflected their ability to establish joint attention and reference with the listener, their knowledge of conversational roles and awareness of self versus other within these roles.;The children's presuppositional skills varied relative to the particular language index being assessed. All children made some modifications in language relative to naive versus knowledgeable listener contexts. Differentiation of the disparate listener contexts was seen on quantitative measures (such as increased frequency of talk with the naive listener) and on some qualitative measures (such as increased use of new nouns with the naive listener). All children demonstrated difficulty in being informative when sharing experiences with naive and knowledgeable listeners.;In terms of non-linguistic perspective-taking, a continuum of skills were seen with excellent to minimal visual perspective-taking performance. When language was introduced on one visual perspective-taking task, the presence of language enhanced some children's perspective-taking performance and it hindered other children's performance.;Finally, intra-subject and inter-subject variations were seen in all dimensions of perspective-taking studied. The considerable variation found in the children's performance indicates that individual differences need to be carefully considered in future research studies.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
