Laura Sterponi

Mutual apprentices : The making of parenthood and childhood in family dinner conversations

Starting from a view of socialization as a bidirectional process, the paper contributes to the field of language socialization in detailing how conversational interaction provides tools for parents and children to collaboratively construe a sense of moral meaning and social order. The paper illustrates both the agentive participation of Italian children in dialogue on normative behavior and ways that their discursive contributions shape the structure and thematic content of parental talk that ensues. Parental responses to children’s normative transgressions socialize them also into the language of transgression. The children we studied supply and elicit accounts from others that attempt to justify or explain transgression.

Limitations and transformations of habitus in Child-Directed Communication

This article offers an alternative approach to paradigms that cast culture solely as a nurturing influence on childrens language development. It proposes a dimensional model of Child-Directed Communication (CDC) to delineate ways in which a communitys habitus may impede the communicative potential of children with neuro-developmental conditions such as severe autism. It argues that certain features of Euro-American CDC are illadapted for autistic children. Due to inertia, caregivers often find themselves unable to transcend the limitations of CDC habitus. Yet, occasionally, a transformation in CDC emerges that more effectively engages children with impairments. The article analyzes one such transformation forged in the niche of a unique mother–son relationship in India and then introduced in the USA.

Accountability in Family Discourse: Socialization into Norms and Standards and Negotiation of Responsibility in Italian Dinner Conversations.

This article explores morality as situated activity and approaches the discursive practice of accountability in Italian family dinner conversations as an avenue for understanding the construction of moral behaviour in everyday interpersonal interaction. The article focuses in particular on vicarious accounts, namely accounts, or explanations, provided by parents for a child’s misbehaviour. It examines the multiple socializing functions that vicarious accounts accomplish and the different dimensions of responsibility that they mobilize. While scaffolding children’s participation in episodes of accountability, vicarious accounts set up constraints on children’s autonomy of action, neutralizing more subversive and blameworthy interpretations of their problematic conduct. In this sense, vicarious accounts are qualified concessions and are face-saving acts both for the child whose action was signalled as improper and for the parent who initially requested the account.

Rethinking echolalia: repetition as interactional resource in the communication of a child with autism.

Echolalia is a pervasive phenomenon in verbal children with autism, traditionally conceived of as an automatic behavior with no communicative function. However, recently it has been shown that echoes may serve interactional goals. This article, which presents a case study of a six-year-old child with autism, examines how social interaction organizes autism echolalia and how repetitive speech responds to discernible interactional trajectories. Using linguistic, discourse, and acoustic analyses, we demonstrate that the child is able to mobilize echolalia to mark different stances, through the segmental and suprasegmental modulation of echoes. We offer an interpretive framework that deepens our understanding of the complex interactions that children with autism can engage in by using echoes, and discuss the implications of this perspective for current views of atypical language development in autism.

Construction of Rules, Accountability and Moral Identity by High-Functioning Children with Autism

This article explores how high-functioning children with autism navigate in the social world, specifically how they orient in the realm of norms and standards. In particular, this investigation focuses on rule violations episodes and sheds light on how these children account for their (mis)conduct and position themselves in the moral framework. This analysis shows that high-functioning children with autism can actively engage in discourse about norms and transgressions in an initiatory capacity, thereby displaying a mastery of social rules as a guide for appropriate conduct and interpretation of others’ behavior. Furthermore, this article argues that these social skills are linked with the ability to operate with sequentially based understandings: Prior courses of action constitute for the autistic children the fundamental source for reaching an understanding of the normative mechanics of everyday life, and subsequently for constructing their own lines of conduct and themselves as moral agents.

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.

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.

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.

Animating Characters and Experiencing Selves: A Look at Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder Constructing Fictional Storyboards with Typically Developing Peers

In this chapter, Bottema-Beutel and colleagues explore ways in which adolescents with ASD experience self and others through a fictional storyboard. They describe two spheres of relating to others: the sphere of character action and the sphere of audience reception. Analyses suggest it is not the experience of self or other per se that is at risk in individuals with ASD but flexibility with which self and other are brought into being. Too rigid adherence to explicit sociocultural conventions can result in enactments of the other that are not aligned with the interlocutors’ enactment of similar others. The authors argue that it is not only mental state language into which we should look for insights about a sense of self and relatedness displayed by individuals with ASD. Autistic understanding of self and others is enactive and sociocultural; it is rooted in action and convention.

Understanding children's mental health conditions in their interactional environment: conversation analysis and autism

This paper provides a methodological overview of applied conversation analysis, showing how this qualitative approach can contribute to our understanding of social interaction in medical settings and the workings of healthcare institutions. Children’s mental health, with a focus on autism, is taken as case in point. We first examine how mental health difficulties can affect interaction but also how interactional dynamics can impact the manifestation of mental conditions. We then survey work on institutional practices devoted to defining children’s mental health conditions, notably psychological assessments. Thirdly, we consider the study of consultation and intervention settings. In the paper’s final part, we envision new areas within which conversation analysis can be brought to bear not only to deepen our understanding of children’s mental suffering but also to enhance the well-being of children and their caregivers.