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Article published In: Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 24:3 (2017) ► pp.315–345

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When “Goal!” means ‘soccer’

Verbatim fictive speech as communicative strategy by children with autism and two control groups

 | Zhejiang University
 | Federal University of Juiz de Fora
 | Case Western Reserve University
Published online: 28 February 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.17038.pas
Abstract
Autism is characterized by repetitive behavior and difficulties in adopting the viewpoint of others. We examine a communicative phenomenon resulting from these symptoms: non-prototypical direct speech for non-reports involving an actual utterance from previously produced discourse (e.g. quoting somebody’s words to refer to them, Pascual, Esther. 2014. Fictive interaction: The conversation frame in thought, language and discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). We video-recorded the naturalistic speech of five Brazilian children with autism, five typically developing children of the same mental age, and five of the same chronological age. They all used so-called fictive speech (Pascual, Esther. 2014. Fictive interaction: The conversation frame in thought, language and discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Dornelas, Aline & Esther Pascual. 2016. Echolalia as communicative strategy: Fictive interaction in the speech of children with autism. In Esther Pascual & Sergeiy Sandler (eds.), The conversation frame: Forms and functions of fictive interaction, 343–361. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) for narration, expressing needs, and referring to individuals and events (e.g. saying Goal! for ‘playing soccer’). Such verbatim fictive speech originated in specific prior interactions or in socio-communicative or socio-cultural knowledge. We found considerable differences in the three groups in the frequency and degree of creativeness of fictive speech as opposed to it representing standard linguistic formulae or echoing previously produced speech word by word.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Echolalia
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Qualitative analysis
    • 4.1ASD group
    • 4.2Control group 1 (matching mental age)
    • 4.3Control group 2 (matching chronological age)
  • 5.Quantitative results and comparison
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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2025.  Parental perceptions of echolalia in neurotypical children aged 1 – 2.5 years . International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Xie, Fan, Esther Pascual & Todd Oakley
2023. Functional echolalia in autism speech: Verbal formulae and repeated prior utterances as communicative and cognitive strategies. Frontiers in Psychology 14 DOI logo

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