Language, autism, and childhood: An ethnographic perspective

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics

Volumn 28, Issue , 2008, Pages 150-169

  Solomon, Olga ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 56649088368     PISSN: 02671905     EISSN: 14716356     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1017/S0267190508080148     Document Type: Review

References (54)

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2. Ochs, E. (2002). Becoming a speaker of culture. In C. Kramsch (Ed.), Language acquisition and language socialization: Ecological perspectives (pp. 99-119). New York: Continuum Press. In this article, Ochs mapped the playing field of cultural knowledge through examination of the children engagement in ordinary activities such as playing softball during school recess with their peers or taking a math test. The article applies the language socialization framework to understanding the challenges and competencies that high-functioning children with ASD display in everyday interaction.
3. Ochs, E., & Solomon, O. (2004). Practical logic and autism. In R. Edgerton & C. Casey (Eds.), A companion to psychological anthropology: Modernity and psychocultural change, pp. 140-167. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Ochs and Solomon examined the practice-based paradigms of Bourdieu and Garfinkel, specifically, the relation between structure and agency, through the prism of autism. They argued that practical logic is not a homogeneous domain of competence, but that it presents degrees of complexity when applied to the flow of local and extended actions and expressed or implicated propositions. The practical proclivities of children with autism illuminate the primacy of structure over improvisation.
4. Ochs, E., Solomon, O., & Sterponi, L. (2005). Limitations and transformations of habitus in child-directed communication. Discourse Studies, Special Issue: Theories and Models of Language, Interaction and Culture, 7(4-5), 547-584. Drawing on Bourdieu's practice theory and his notion of habitus, this article critically examines the notion that culture has a solely nurturing influence on children's language development. It proposes a dimensional model of child-directed communication (CDC) to delineate ways in which a community's habitus may impede the communicative potential of children with neurodevelopmental conditions such as severe autism.
5. Ochs, E., Kremer-Sadlik, T., Sirota, K., & Solomon, O. (2004). Autism and the social world: An anthropological perspective. Discourse Studies, 6(2), 147-183. This programmatic article offers an anthropological perspective on autism and expands the scope of inquiry from the interpersonal domain, in which autism has been predominantly examined, to the sociocultural one. The authors argued that persons with autism need to be viewed not only as individuals in relation to others individuals but also as members of social groups. The article articulates a sociocultural approach to perspective-taking in autism in three social domains: participating in conversational turn-taking and sequences, formulating situational scenarios, and interpreting sociocultural meanings of indexical forms and behavior. The differential success across these domains forms a cline of competence, from most success in conversational turn-taking to least in inferring indexical meanings. Implications of these abilities and limitations are considered for theoretical approaches to society and culture.
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