Pragmatics Literature Review

The method describes the participants as two children diagnosed with autism and had language skills that were appropriate for the Social Stories intervention. The participants were in two different general education kindergarten classrooms, full-time at a public elementary school. The fist participant, Matt, was a 6-year-old Asian American boy who had a teaching assistant assigned to his classroom and the second participant, Ted, was a 5-year-old Caucasian boy who had a teaching assistant assigned to accompany throughout the school day. The participants received training sessions one to four times per-week that were conducted in private rooms for 10 to 20 minutes in the morning before class at each participant’s school. The participants only read Social Stories that only pertained to their individual targeted behaviors for intervention. The stories used had no pictures, only large text on white paper. The participants were read one story per

Autism is a spectrum disorder with a wide range of symptoms and degrees of impairment. A person with autism lives for the most part in an isolated world unaware of the impact their behavior has on the immediate environment. Even though some may be high functioning, the majority (around 70-75%) has some amount of associated learning disabilities and about 50% score below 50 on the IQ scale. When there are profound cognitive impairments, adequate speech development is not likely, and additionally the incidence of aberrant behavior increases (Howlin, 1996). Aberrant behaviors are behavioral excesses that interfere with interaction opportunities within an individual’s environment (Matson, et al., 1996). Another high impacting area of deficiency is socialization skills. This area includes decreased responding to verbal initiations of others, inappropriate affect or facial expression during communicative interactions, eye contact and preservation on the same topic even when cues are given by the partner for a topic shift (Koegel, & Frea, 1993). Social skill impairment has some relation to the language impairment. Expressive and receptive language difficulties occur in a high percentage of autistic individuals. Difficulties in expressing thoughts and ideas can lead to outbursts of anxiety, aggression, and self-injurious behavior in those with low ability and therefore it is often incorporated into treatment approaches for

Describe how children’s interactions in retelling or recreating familiar stories may provide evidence of their pragmatic knowledge.

Children with autism also known as autism spectrum disorder or ASD, have social, communication and language problems. It can vary from very severe to very moderate. Many children with autism tend to have restricted and repetitive patters of behavior, interest and activities. Although autism is a developmental disability, not all children with autism have the exact effects. Children with autism can have some of the following social and communication skills and behaviors such as: Social skills, communication skills, and common behaviors, leading to difficulties in areas like imaginative play. When a child has problems with their social skills it may be hard for them to connect or interact with other people. Most, if not all autistic suffer from communication skills such as understanding, talking with others, reading or writing, following directions, knowing how to behave, concentrating on tasks, and more importantly understanding and using of words. For children with autism, communication development happens differently and more

Autism affects many children each year and it is important for parents to be aware of delays in their child’s development, in in any area of communication. According to a study by the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism and Related Disorders, autistic children possessing a language difficulty or delay have a seventy percent chance of showing fluent speech by the age of eight (“Speech”). Although a child shows delay or impairment in language at a young age, it is possible for them to later on exhibit normal language development. Parents should be aware of normal language benchmarks, such as when a child begins babbling, imitating verbally, and using spoken and first words. If a child is lacking skills normally possessed by typically developing children, having said child

Clinical Pragmatics reflects an emerging awareness that some communication difficulties could not be attributed to ‘purely’ linguistic problems. For a long time before that, practicing speech and language therapists had worked with children and adults whose primary difficulties seemed to lie with the understanding and/or production of connected discourse. (‘Relevance Theory and Communication Disorders’ Eeva Leinonen and Nuala Ryder, 2008.)

The Verbal Behaviour (VB) approach is to teach all the skills including, most importantly, language skills, to the children with autism and related disorder (Barbera & Rasmussen, 2007, p.19).He stated that verbal behaviour is a functional analysis of language that is simply the behaviour that is affected by antecedents and consequences in the same ways as nonverbal behaviour (A-B-C), the same 3-terms Contingency. In his studies in the year 1957, he identified and described various Verbal Operants, or the units of analysis and separate response categories. As also he identified speaker and listener skills as a separate repertoires and stated that both must be taught individually. He also stated that

To assess this patient, a formal measure that can be utilized is the Right Hemisphere Language Battery – Second Edition (RHLB-2). The RHLB-2 provides information on the patient regarding their communicative functions that are disturbed by their RHD, and therefore would be an appropriate formal measure for the evaluation and assessment. The RHLB-2 is a comprehensive assessment, which includes seven subtests. This test will provide diagnostic information on metaphor comprehension or spoken and written language, knowledge of inferred meaning, humor, and “production of emphatic stress.” “The lexical semantic subtest will assess the patients ability to pair verbal words to its matching picture.” (Brookshire & McNeil, 2015).

Communication is significant issue for many children with autism. They do not contact with other people clearly, and they also have many issues in using the language correctly. In the article “Cerebellum, Language, and Cognition in Autism and Specific Language Impairment” Hodge (2010) writes that children with autism have difficulties at the individual understands (receptive language) as well as what is actually spoken by the individual (expressive language) are significantly delayed or nonexistent. In other words, children with autism face difficulties to express their thoughts clearly or response to other people. However, In the article “Making Meaningful Worlds: Role-Playing Subcultures and the Autism Spectrum” Fein (2015) claims that there

Akhtar & Gernsbacher (2007) attempt to explain this atypical pattern of language development for those with Autism, in the idea that in typically developing children initiating interactions was found to be less correlated with vocabulary development compared to responding interactions. Additionally Austic children may still make gains in language development by a reliance on responding to joint attention and less on initiating joint attention which reportedly they exhibit less (Laing et al., 2002).

The purpose of this chapter is to review the literate that identifies and examines early identification of social communication deficits related to autism spectrum disorder. It will also review literature based around early interventions to improve social communication deficits. This paper will begin by identifying retrospective research studies followed by prospective students. It will continue with evidence based interventions identified by the American Speech – Language – Hearing – Associations (ASHS)

Some children with autism experience delayed speech and communication skills while others may use no language at all. It should be noted that most of these children use spoken language, but in most cases they don’t integrate these skills to communal interactions in their daily life. More often, it has been revealed that children with autism may miss to attain functional speech and some are said to be totally non-verbal. Failure to communicate in a purposeful way may be the most disturbing symptom of this disorder. Deficits in communication and language abilities have been cited as the major behavioral variation for young children with autistic disorders. Poor communication is seen to

One way, pragmatics may become part of the curriculum is through student collaboration. When considering the 4 C’s- communication and collaboration is required by all students. Therefore, providing students the opportunities to engage in activities to practice and learn pragmatic skills while working with others. Some students may receive direct instruction from the speech pathologist, typically serving children on IEP’s, however through the MTSS model, a student receiving Tier 3 services could potentially receive instruction in pragmatics.

George Santayana described Pragmatism this way, “American pragmatism connects the American experimental and inventive attitude with older philosophical ideas” (Stumpf 397).

Throughout the conversation, Andrea displayed a mastery of complex syntactic and morphological form (mean length of utterance= 7.87) which is expected for her age. Of the 57 utterances examined, Andrea only abandoned 10 utterances (accounting for only 17% of the sample), usually in favor of of a clearer explanation of sequence of events or choice of words. Her mastery of semantics was not displayed as appropriately (type token