Mats Andrén

Don’t Laugh! Socialization of Laughter and Smiling in Pre-school and School Settings

Although laughter and smiling is generally thought of in terms of positive emotions and values, this is not always the case. In this paper we analyze situations where children’s smiling and laughter are treated as undesirable by other participants—peers and teachers—in preschool and school settings. Participants’ treatment of children’s laughs and smiles as accountable, even sanctionable, provides one piece of the larger puzzle of how emotional expressions form an emerging social competence, negotiated and co-constructed in and through social interaction. The analysis shows how emotional expressions such as laughter and smiling are part of, and subject to, processes of socialization, i.e., social knowledge about embodied moral norms.

Gesture and multimodal development

delayed in their acquisition of syntax, there was no evidence that syntactic development follows a qualitatively atypical course. These findings spark the question that has interested me for years – given the profound social-cognitive challenges that are a defining feature of ASD, how is it that many children nevertheless acquire a vast repertoire of semantic and syntactic knowledge? Douglas’s answer is that the weight of evidence favours an innate grammar that is modular and not susceptible to social influence. I do not think the evidence reported here necessarily leads to that conclusion, in part because the evidence is limited to samples of expressive language. As a result, we have very limited information about the other linguistic, social and cognitive skills that these children have brought to the task of language learning. Douglas does provide a valiant effort to consider the relationship between theory of mind abilities and syntactic competence, but this is hampered by the fact that theory of mind understanding is inferred from the language the children produce. As Douglas herself notes, the absence of particular constructions in output does not necessarily mean that the child does not possess that construct. Thus the fact that two children produce complex syntax in the absence of flexible use of mental state verbs does not necessarily indicate that syntax must be innate. I found the level of detailed transcription, the examples and the range of actions, events and states that children could produce fascinating and I was similarly intrigued by the apparent differences in the cohorts. The US cohort, recruited some 20 years ago under very different diagnostic frameworks, were clearly more severely impaired socially and linguistically than the more recently recruited cohort from Australia. Although this study was not designed to consider issues of diagnosis or changes in the diagnostic landscape, it does highlight that any conclusions about ‘language in ASD’ will be heavily influenced by the diagnostic criteria employed. I did feel the study would have been enhanced tremendously by the inclusion of typically developing children of a similar MLU level, or a cross-disorder comparison involving children with other neurodevelopmental disorders at a similar stage of language development. Such a design should allow for more subtle differences in language trajectories to be revealed and would allow us to say what is specific to autism. In sum, this book will be of interest to anyone who is interested in how language develops in exceptional circumstances. I particularly loved the focus on verbs, as the point at which semantics and syntax converge. Although I did not agree with the conclusion, the book reminds me of the perplexing questions that remain to be answered. In particular, why are the language outcomes of children with autism so variable and what underlying factors can explain this variation in language development?

Book Review: Jean-Marc Colletta and Michèle Guidetti (Eds.), Gesture and multimodal development (Benjamins Current Topics volume 39):

delayed in their acquisition of syntax, there was no evidence that syntactic development follows a qualitatively atypical course. These findings spark the question that has interested me for years – given the profound social-cognitive challenges that are a defining feature of ASD, how is it that many children nevertheless acquire a vast repertoire of semantic and syntactic knowledge? Douglas’s answer is that the weight of evidence favours an innate grammar that is modular and not susceptible to social influence. I do not think the evidence reported here necessarily leads to that conclusion, in part because the evidence is limited to samples of expressive language. As a result, we have very limited information about the other linguistic, social and cognitive skills that these children have brought to the task of language learning. Douglas does provide a valiant effort to consider the relationship between theory of mind abilities and syntactic competence, but this is hampered by the fact that theory of mind understanding is inferred from the language the children produce. As Douglas herself notes, the absence of particular constructions in output does not necessarily mean that the child does not possess that construct. Thus the fact that two children produce complex syntax in the absence of flexible use of mental state verbs does not necessarily indicate that syntax must be innate. I found the level of detailed transcription, the examples and the range of actions, events and states that children could produce fascinating and I was similarly intrigued by the apparent differences in the cohorts. The US cohort, recruited some 20 years ago under very different diagnostic frameworks, were clearly more severely impaired socially and linguistically than the more recently recruited cohort from Australia. Although this study was not designed to consider issues of diagnosis or changes in the diagnostic landscape, it does highlight that any conclusions about ‘language in ASD’ will be heavily influenced by the diagnostic criteria employed. I did feel the study would have been enhanced tremendously by the inclusion of typically developing children of a similar MLU level, or a cross-disorder comparison involving children with other neurodevelopmental disorders at a similar stage of language development. Such a design should allow for more subtle differences in language trajectories to be revealed and would allow us to say what is specific to autism. In sum, this book will be of interest to anyone who is interested in how language develops in exceptional circumstances. I particularly loved the focus on verbs, as the point at which semantics and syntax converge. Although I did not agree with the conclusion, the book reminds me of the perplexing questions that remain to be answered. In particular, why are the language outcomes of children with autism so variable and what underlying factors can explain this variation in language development?