Kenton de Kirby

Rethinking language in autism

In this article, we invite a rethinking of traditional perspectives of language in autism. We advocate a theoretical reappraisal that offers a corrective to the dominant and largely tacitly held view that language, in its essence, is a referential system and a reflection of the individual’s cognition. Drawing on scholarship in Conversation Analysis and linguistic anthropology, we present a multidimensional view of language, showing how it also functions as interactional accomplishment, social action, and mode of experience. From such a multidimensional perspective, we revisit data presented by other researchers that include instances of prototypical features of autistic speech, giving them a somewhat different—at times complementary, at times alternative—interpretation. In doing so, we demonstrate that there is much at stake in the view of language that we as researchers bring to our analysis of autistic speech. Ultimately, we argue that adopting a multidimensional view of language has wide ranging implications, deepening our understanding of autism’s core features and developmental trajectory.

Studying Cognition through Time in a Classroom Community: The Interplay between “Everyday” and “Scientific Concepts”

This paper presents an analytic approach for understanding the interplay through time between “scientific” and “everyday concepts” in a mathematics classroom community. To illustrate the approach, we focus on an elementary classroom implementing an integers and fractions lesson sequence that makes use of the number line as a principal representational context. In our analysis of the communitys emerging collective practices (recurring structures of joint activity), we trace the interplay between childrens sensorimotor actions (displacing, counting, and splitting) and the mathematical definitions supported in the classroom, like definitions of unit interval or equivalent fractions. In our illustrative analysis, we find that the teacher orchestrated collective practices to support the use of actions to make sense of the formal definitions, and the use of definitions to regulate actions. Though we illustrate the analytic approach for a particular classroom community, the approach illuminates teaching-learning dynamics that transcend any particular classroom or subject matter domain.

Understanding Learning Across Lessons in Classroom Communities: A Multi-leveled Analytic Approach

This chapter presents a methodology for studying classroom communities as microcultures, with a focus on processes of teaching and learning over significant spans of time. In Sect. 11.1, we present a conceptual framework that treats classroom activity at two levels of analysis, collective and individual. Both levels are geared for understanding the reproduction and alteration of a common ground of talk and action through time. Key concerns are the emergence of collective norms and individuals’ use of representational forms to serve varied functions in classroom communicative and problem solving activity. In Sect. 11.2, we show how the conceptual framework was used to organize two related programs of empirical research. First, we present design research that led to a 19-lesson sequence on integers and fractions , which uses the number line as a central representational form. Second, we use the framework to organize an empirical analysis of a single classroom community over the 19-lesson sequence. We illustrate empirical techniques for capturing the reproduction and alteration of a common ground with shifting lesson topics. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the way the analytic approach illuminates core processes of teaching and learning and the utility of the approach for future work.

A Multidimensional Reappraisal of Language in Autism: Insights from a Discourse Analytic Study.

In this article, we leverage theoretical insights and methodological guidelines of discourse analytic scholarship to re-examine language phenomena typically associated with autism. Through empirical analysis of the verbal behavior of three children with autism, we engage the question of how prototypical features of autistic language—notably pronoun atypicality, pragmatic deficit, and echolalia—might conceal competencies and interactional processes that are largely invisible in mainstream research. Our findings offer a complex picture of children with autism in their use of language to communicate, interact and experience others. Such a picture also deepens our understanding of the interactional underpinnings of autistic children’s speech. Finally, we describe how our findings offer fruitful suggestions for clinical intervention.

Cultural context of cognitive development.

UNLABELLED The cognitive problems that children formulate and solve in their daily lives necessarily take form in a cultural context. We review and illustrate two dominant approaches to study relations between cultural context and cognitive development, and we point to the limitations and affordances of each. Using a dichotomous approach, scholars employ a methodology that sharply differentiates cognition from cultural context, treating elements of cultural context as independent variables and elements of cognition as dependent variables. The approach often leads to propositions about transcultural features of context that influence the cognitive development of individuals. In contrast, using an intrinsic relations approach, researchers create units of analysis that capture relations between cognition and cultural context, investigating their mutual grounding in daily activities. We also review a small but important body of research that extends these approaches to diachronic analysis. This research seeks to understand shifting relations between cultural context and cognitive development over historical time. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:447-461. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1300 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. CONFLICT OF INTEREST The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Subjectivity in Autistic Language: Insights on Pronoun Atypicality from Three Case Studies

In this chapter, we examine a clinical feature typically associated with the speech of children with autism: pronoun reversal and avoidance. Children with autism are reported to use the second-person pronoun you or third-person pronoun he/she to refer to themselves, as well as to use the first-person pronoun I to refer to the person addressed. This behaviour is referred to as pronominal reversal. In addition, affected children make frequent use of proper names to refer to self or the addressee and sometimes deploy agentless passive constructions. These speech patterns are referred to as pronominal avoidance. These phenomena are located at the intersection of linguistic and social-relational processes, and as such they constitute a particularly interesting area of investigation. For the study of language acquisition generally, these phenomena reveal language’s social underpinnings, as well as the relationship between language and the development of self. For autism research, atypical pronoun usage offers potential insights about core features of the condition.

Using Geometrical Representations as Cognitive Technologies

In this article we provide a treatment of geometric diagrams as a semiotic ‘technology’ in mathematics education. To this end, we review two classroom observations and one experimental study that illuminate the potential for communicative breakdown in the use of this technology, as well as possibilities for mitigating the breakdown. In the classroom observations, we show that rather than ‘seeing through’ the diagrams to the idealized mathematical objects (a pervasive semiotic practice in academic mathematics), upper-elementary grade students may treat the misleading appearances of the diagrams as mathematically significant. We argue that one source of such communicative breakdowns is that the ‘rules’ for using the semiotic technology are rarely made explicit in classrooms. In the experimental study, we review findings showing that when students’ have access to mathematical definitions that distinguish between the diagram and the idealized mathematical object (e.g., a diagram of a mathematical point is the size of a small dot, but a true mathematical point has no size), they are less likely to rely on the misleading appearances of the diagrams; we also found that this effect increases over grade level. The issues explored in this article suggest that upper elementary students could benefit from explicit treatment of definitional practices in academic mathematics. At a broader theoretical level, the findings serve to emphasize the potential for any semiotic technology to have multiple meanings and the role of active sense making in communications with and about technologies.

Two Ways of Understanding Learning: Integrating the Profile and Principle Approaches

This final chapter is offered as an opportunity to reflect on the book as a whole, and to appreciate how the perspective we’ve developed amounts to a fundamentally different way of understanding not just differences between students, but learning itself. The more familiar approach, which focuses on the identification of discrete weaknesses and strengths in individual students, we’ve already identified as the profile view.

How Enlarging the Classroom Makes Room for Variation in Cognitive Capacities

This chapter begins Part III of the book. In Part I, we developed an understanding of largely unconscious organizing processes that are essential to learning. In Part II, we considered what this understanding means for classroom teaching. Here in Part III, we will reflect on the material covered so far, with the goal of gaining a deeper appreciation of the perspective we have developed.

How Things Go Wrong: Breakdowns in Organization

Over the course of this book, we’ve adopted the neuropsychological concept of organization to help us characterize the unconscious processes that enable us to learn. While we are using the term in a technical sense, it is helpful for our purposes to note that organization, in the everyday sense of the word, is evocative of structure and activity. These connotations are entirely apt – they help to highlight just how much activity our minds are constantly engaged in, which, though unaware of it, we are entirely dependent upon to make our experience comprehensible and in order to learn.