On the Acquisition of Discourse among Autistic Children  

Oleh:

Peng, Fred C. C.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 10 no. 1 (1988), page 193-224.
Fulltext: 10_01_Peng_02.pdf (1.49MB)

Isi artikel

Autistic children have great difficulties acquiring the ability to talk, a symptom that is well known for their behaviour. The etiology of autism is diverse, ranging from organic to functional causes, but the sequala is the same: Autistic children do not talk, if they have already acquired a language, are inattentive, hyperactive, and emotionally fragile. Even so, they can still be taught to talk and acquire a language or regain the language they have already acquired prior to the onset of the disease but lost as part of the sequala. In this article, I shall describe the acquisition of discourse among autistic children selected from a school in Japan, called Musashino Higashi Gakuen, where children diagnosed as autistic are being trained to talk or even to acquire a language. I should emphasize that my objective here is not to discuss the merits of the training method, but to describe the progress Japanese autistic children have made in one significant aspect of language skills, viz., discourse. The method employed for this study was cross-sectional, using non-autistic children of the same age groups as controls for comparison. The subjects were all primary school children, ranging from grade 1 to grade 6 in age, the total being 35 for both autistic subjects and controls. The technique used to elicit data waslex~~menta1; each subject was asked to describe what he/she saw in a five-frame cartooh. The aim was to check (1) whether or not the child was able to link the five frames1 of the cartoon strip in a narrative fasion; (2) whether or not the subject has acquired the linguistic skills for expressing the varying forms of action and the objects that appear in the cartoon; and (3) whether or not the child was able to concentrate, viz., was attentive enough when performing the task and, if not, whether or not assistance was required to carry out the experiment. It may take a long time before anyone has an answer to how autistic children happen to be able to acquire a language. But I believe it is also important to learn how they improve their language once they have acquired the rudiments of it. This presentation is a step forward in that direction.

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