Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2008) 28, 150–169. Printed in the USA.

Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press 0267-1905/08 $16.00

doi:10.1017/S0267190508080148

8. LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD:

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE

Olga Solomon

This article reviews recent ethnographic studies on how children with autism
spectrum disorders (ASD) use language in their everyday lives: how they are
socialized into sociocultural competence, how they participate in the social world as
members of families and communities, how they draw on structural properties of
social interaction to participate in everyday talk, and to what extent the European
American habitus of child-directed communication supports or hinders their
communicative development. Other studies reviewed in this article examine language
use in autism in relation to narrative, question–answer sequences, bilingualism,
accountability and morality, and politeness. The studies frame autism more
ethno-methodologically than clinically and capture how children with ASD actively
participate in the co-construction of their life worlds through communication with
others. This perspective makes visible aspects of language use and everyday
experiences of children with ASD and their families that are usually obscured in
other theoretical approaches to autism. Through participant observation and extensive
naturalistic data collection involving video and audio recording of everyday
interaction, ethnographic studies reviewed in this article shed light on patterns of
language use and link these patterns to particular cultural practices, making language
of children with autism more intelligible and interpretable.

This article reviews recent ethnographic research on how children with

autism spectrum disorders (ASD) use language in their everyday lives. Conducted at
the Ethnography of Autism laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA), the research studies reviewed in this article were based on participant
observation and extensive video and audio recording of everyday social interaction.
These studies differ from most investigations that constitute autism research because
they frame autism more ethno-methodologically than clinically: more as an
experience and a way of being in a social world and less as a disorder in need of an
intervention. These studies examined language as it is used in situ by children with
ASD rather than seeing their language as a disembodied cognitive process awaiting
remediation. Moreover, from the ethnographic perspective, children with ASD are
seen as actively participating in the co-construction of their life worlds through

150
 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 151

communication with others, rather than being acted upon by these others to be
managed or treated. Last, the ethnographic perspective affords a privileged view of
how the children and their family members engage with each other in their everyday
lives, how they go about their daily activities together, and what kinds of personal
experiences they share with one another. This ethnographic perspective makes visible
aspects of language use and everyday experiences of children with ASD and their
families that are usually obscured in other theoretical approaches to autism.

Autism is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that disrupts

sociocommunicative development. In the United States, over 1.5 million people
currently live with some form of autism, and the prevalence of autistic disorder in
children is estimated at 6 to 7 per 1,000 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
2007; Fombonne, 2003). Laboratory studies of cognitive, sociocommunicative, and
linguistic functioning across the autism spectrum have resulted in a taxonomy of
impairments that cluster to form an “autistic phenotype,” such as language delay,
pronoun reversal, atypical use of gesture and eye gaze, echoing of own or others’
utterances and reciting stretches of talk from videos and films, lack of imaginative
play, lack of reciprocity and shared enjoyment of objects or events, and inability to
form age-appropriate friendships (Lord & Spence, 2006; Micali, Chakrabarti, &
Fombonne, 2004).

A theory of mind (ToM) account of autism was proposed to integrate

impairments in pragmatics of language use and in nonverbal social behavior
(Walenski, Tager-Flusberg, & Ullman, 2006). According to this account, ToM
impairments prevent persons with ASD from being able to perceive a cause-and-effect
relationship between mental states and actions, whether their own or other people’s,
thus resulting in “abnormalities in understanding other minds” (Baron-Cohen, 2000,
p. 3). Cognitive psychology sees ToM as “one of the quintessential abilities that make
us human” (Baron-Cohen, p. 3), positioning individuals diagnosed with autism on the
margins of human experience. Unlike cognitive psychology, developmental
psychopathology does not ask the question of uniqueness (i.e., “How are people with
autism different from other people?”) or specificity (i.e., “What is the specific cause of
their difference?”), but rather it pursues an understanding of “the behavior of persons
with autism and their relationships with others,” of “parent-child relationships and . . .
of the child within the context of various aspects of the community” (Burack,
Charman, Yirmiya, & Zelazo, 2001, p. 5). In this theoretical world, such questions are
addressed through direct tests narrowly targeting specific areas or evaluating a whole
domain of functioning. In both cognitive psychology and developmental
psychopathology, the issue is whether a behavioral deficit or strength is the source of
autistic symptomatology, and to what extent its association indicates primacy of a
particular disfunction in autism (Burack et al., 2001).

“Autism as a subject touches on the deepest questions of ontology, for it

involves a radical deviation in the development of brain and mind,” wrote neurologist
Oliver Sacks (1995, p. 246). “Our insight is advancing, but tantalizingly slowly. The
ultimate understanding of autism may demand both technical advances and
conceptual ones beyond anything we can now dream of” (p. 249). Thus, the
152 SOLOMON

biomedical definition of autism casts it as an ontologically complex disorder that

forces affected persons to live in “some unimaginable, alien world” (p. 249). To
understand the alien world of autism, we need to develop new, previously
inconceivable technologies and conceptual frameworks, Sacks suggested. This
position presents a serious epistemological dilemma laden with institutionally ratified
assumptions and ideologies permeating basic autism research. The enigma view of
autism is sustained by its ambiguous clinical status: incurable but not life-threatening,
autism constitutes a particular, liminal kind of clinical condition, a syndrome but not a
disease (e.g., Muhle, Trencoste, & Rapin, 2004).

Language use of those affected by autism touches on the most fundamental

concerns of applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology: communicative
competence, conversational relevance, intentionality, and intersubjectivity. What
individuals with autism do with their language is often unconventional and sometimes
difficult to interpret, falling in the range from the slightly off, “proximally relevant”
quality (Ochs & Solomon, 2004), to entirely cryptic utterances impossible to perceive
as contingent with any object, linguistic or physical, in the interactional context. The
meaning of the words and the illocutionary force of the speech acts (Austin, 1975) of
those affected with autism are at times uninterpretable. The study of language and
autism also inevitably foregrounds the notions of intentionality and language use. For
example, a child who routinely says “Can I call you right back, sweetie?” when she
does not wish to answer a question (Lord & Spence, 2006) succeeds in deflecting that
question. It is difficult to determine, however, whether persons affected by autism,
especially those affected more severely, intend to use language in this way and
whether they understand what they themselves are attempting to communicate to
others. An alternative explanation, although not the one held by this author, is that
such utterances are produced not by a desire to convey an intentional, albeit obscure
meaning, but are the voice of neurological impairments, as if “broken mirrors”
(Ramachandran & Oberman, 2006) are haphazardly reflecting the musings of a mind
gone astray.

Through participant observation and extensive naturalistic data collection

involving video and audio recording of everyday interaction, ethnographically
informed studies reviewed in this article shed light on these questions of intentionality
and language use, and provide an important contribution to the understanding of
language use in autism more broadly. They do so by examining language use in situ,
identifying patterns of the use of linguistic forms and linking these patterns to
particular cultural practices, making language use of children with autism more
intelligible and interpretable.

Ethnography of Autism Project: Study of High-Functioning Children

Several studies discussed in this article were conducted as part of UCLA

Ethnography of Autism Project, an integrated ethnographic and clinical research
project on everyday interactions of children with ASD (autistic disorder and
Asperger’s disorder; see American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., 1994). Sixteen families with 8- to 12-year-old
 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 153

high-functioning children with ASD were recruited to participate in the project

through clinicians’ referrals and presentations at parent group meetings. All 16
families’ socioeconomic status was middle class, and all but one lived in two-parent
households. The recruitment criteria included, besides a previous diagnosis of autistic
disorder or Asperger’s disorder, a full scale IQ above 70 and full inclusion in regular
classroom. The ethnographic data collection involved documenting the children’s
conversational interactions with family members at home and with peers and teachers
at school. To ensure ethnographically informed data collection, the children were
observed on numerous days at school and video-recorded for up to 1 month while
interacting with their peers and teachers in class during instruction and on the
playground during recess and lunch break. The parents were asked to audio-record
their children’s interactions during breakfast before school, and in the car on the way
to and from school for 5 days. Additionally, each child was video-recorded before,
during, and after family dinnertime. A total corpus of 320 hours of video and 60 hours
of audio data was collected and transferred to digital format. Analytically relevant
stretches of talk were transcribed using conversation analytic conventions (Atkinson
& Heritage, 1984; see Appendix).

The clinical component of the project was carried out by a research team
directed by clinical psychologist Lisa Capps at the University of California, Berkeley
(UCB). The clinical data corpus consisted of approximately 50 hours of video- and
audio-recorded psychological evaluations of the participating children and their
parents. The clinical psychology team confirmed each child’s diagnosis through the
Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R; Le Couteur et al., 1989) and the
Autism Behavior Checklist (ABC; Krug, Arick, & Almond, 1978). The children’s
evaluations included Wechsler Intelligence Scales (WISC-III; Wechsler, 1992); ToM
tests (Baron-Cohen, 1989; Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Happé, 1994); and
tasks measuring empathy, emotion expression, and emotion recognition. Results of
these clinical measures were used as complementary information in video and audio
data analysis.

Study of Children with Severe Autism

Several studies discussed in this article have been conducted as part of a

larger ethnographic language socialization project on communication of children with
severe autism. A data corpus of approximately 200 hours of video-recorded
interactions of 16 children and teens with severe autism ages 3 to 18 was compiled.
The video data documented these children and teens’ interactions with therapists,
family members, teachers, and peers in everyday activities. Additional video data
consisted of ethnographic, person-centered interviews with family members, teachers,
and therapists. The data corpus consists of (1) approximately 100 hours of video
recordings that were selected by the author from a larger video archive collected by
the Cure Autism Now Foundation and (2) approximately 100 hours of video
recordings collected by the author for a research project that followed families
participating in the Cure Autism Now foundation’s project, as well as families
subsequently recruited in Los Angeles and Chicago.
154 SOLOMON

Overview of Research

The overview will first discuss four larger-scale theoretical investigations on

(1) how children with autism are socialized into sociocultural competence to become
“speakers of culture” (Ochs, 2002); (2) how children with autism participate in the
social world as members of families, classrooms, and communities (Ochs,
Kremer-Sadlik, Sirota, & Solomon, 2004); (3) how children with autism draw upon
structural properties of social interaction to participate in everyday talk (Ochs &
Solomon, 2004); and (4) how child-directed communication (CDC) may not have a
solely nurturing influence on children’s language development, but rather may
impede such development for children affected with neurological conditions such as
severe autism (Ochs, Solomon, & Sterponi, 2005).

Following discussion of these four studies, the article will then review five
more narrowly defined studies that examined specific areas of language use and social
behavior in autism: (1) ToM and question-answer sequences (Kremer-Sadlik, 2004);
(2) bilingualism (Kremer-Sadlik, 2005); (3) accountability and morality (Sterponi,
2004); (4) politeness (Sirota, 2004); and (5) narrative (Solomon, 2004). Together,
these nine studies create a collective picture of language use, sociality, and
communicative abilities of children with ASD.

Autism and Language Socialization: Becoming a Speaker of Culture

A central argument of language socialization is that human beings develop

the ability to speak a language as a way of becoming competent members of societies,
and that the development of cultural competence is accomplished through language
(Ochs, 1982, 1988; Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin, 1990; Schieffelin & Ochs,
1986).

Guided by enduring interest in the cultural organization of children’s social

and communicative practices, Ochs (2002) applied language socialization theory to
the study of the knowledge and skills required of high functioning children with ASD
to become competent members of society and culture.

Through close examination of the children’s engagement in ordinary

activities such as a game of softball or a math test, Ochs (2002) mapped the playing
field of cultural knowledge. It consists of the categories and rules of activities;
situational expectations and strategies for acting and positioning self in the course of
these activities; goal-directed acts and participants’ psychological stances towards
these acts; links of acts and stances to expectations of particular participants’ actions;
and the contextualization of the actions, stances, and participants in temporal
enfolding of what just happened and what is about to happen next. Social participation
of children with autism is complicated by the multiplicity of activities that may be
co-occurring. Like neurologically unaffected members, children with autism need to
monitor turn by turn the emergent, contingent interactional construction of social
realities. They need to learn that they have to act within established conventional
parameters to carry out their activities and to realize their social identities. The space
 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 155

within these parameters implies a certain degree of spontaneity and improvisation,

something that children with autism often find challenging.

The challenges faced by children with autism are similar to the challenges
encountered by second language learners, and thus the theoretical framework
described in this study has important implications for second-language acquisition
and socialization. It is useful for understanding cross-cultural similarities and
differences in how language relates to action, stance, activity, and social identity.
Although there is considerable overlap in how speakers across speech communities
signal actions and psychological stances, there are considerable differences in how
they use actions and stances to realize particular activities and identities. Although
these commonalities may help second language learners, the cross-cultural differences
often thwart their efforts to become competent members of their second cultures.
Ethnographic studies of language and autism, Ochs (2002) wrote, illuminate how

communication breaks down because the action or the stance is not

expected by one or another interlocutor, or went on too long or too
briefly or at the wrong time and place in the particular activity
underway, or for the particular social role, status or relationship
attempted. (p. 114)

These insights are useful for a more general understanding of the processes
underlying first and second language acquisition and socialization.

Autism and the Social World

Ochs et al. (2004) extended the scope of inquiry on language, social

interaction, and autism from the interpersonal domain in which autism has been
defined as a disorder of theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Baron-Cohen et al.,
1985) to the sociocultural one. Arguing for a distinction between social as
interpersonal and social as sociocultural, Ochs et al. proposed that persons with
autism need to be viewed as participating members of social groups and communities,
and not only as individuals in relation to other individuals as has been the case in
psychological research. To this end, this ethnographically informed study considered
persons with autism as sociocultural beings who act displaying both social abilities
and difficulties that are relative to socioculturally organized expectations of
competence and conduct. This reframing of autism in anthropological, rather than
psychological terms afforded a new sociocultural approach to understanding
challenges in perspective-taking faced by individuals with autism in social interaction.

The sociocultural perspective-taking entails not only knowledge and skills

necessary for interpersonal engagement, but also sociocultural knowledge and skills
that make it possible for members of social groups to perform and interpret
conventional social behaviors, roles, activities, and norms organizing a range of
institutions, from families and schools to workplace and religious communities. It
involves the production, interpretation, and prediction of human social behavior
beyond one-on-one social interaction. While interpersonal perspective-taking has
156 SOLOMON

been defined as the understanding of another person’s, or even one’s own, intentions,
beliefs, knowledge, or feelings (e.g., Happé, 2003), sociocultural perspective-taking
requires the understanding of other members’ expected intentions, beliefs,
knowledge, or feelings that are conventionally linked to socioculturally organized
practices, roles, institution, and membership in a social group.

Having outlined the boundaries of the sociocultural perspective-taking, Ochs

et al. (2004) examined how children with autism display it across three interactional
domains: conversational turn-taking and sequences; formulating situational scenarios
involving other persons, and interpreting the sociocultural meanings of indexical
forms and behaviors. Analysis of video-recorded spontaneous social interactions
involving children with autism spectrum disorders evinced a cline of competence,
ranging from most success in anticipating conversational moves and participating in
conversational turn-taking to least success in inferring indexical meanings of forms
and behaviors.

For example, the 8- to 12-year-old high-functioning children with ASD

participating in the Ethnography of Autism Project had few difficulties taking their
turns at talk at expected transition-relevant places. It is important to remind the reader
that all children in the study had full IQ scores in the “nonretarded” range, which
spanned from 73 to 139. Moreover, the majority of the children (15 out of 16) passed
the first-order ToM task, and exactly half of the children (8 out of 16) were able to
pass the second-order ToM test. In relation to the competence in conversational
turn-taking, similar findings were reported by Frith, Happé, and Siddons (1994).
Their caregiver-report study was based on Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales to
examine real-life adaptive skills of children with autism who pass standard ToM tests.
Frith and colleagues reported that the “passers” of false belief ToM tasks engaged in
social behavior that was characterized by better than expected skills in language use
and demonstrated their understanding of others’ mental states.

Examples of this kind abound in the ethnography of autism data corpus. In

the following interaction, Connor, an 8-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome,
disagrees with his father about the choice of musical instruments that he plans to play
in a music band at his school (see Appendix for transcription conventions):

Connor: One year of the violin and the next year um (the flute).

Father: I don’t know if they would let you do that, though.

Connor: No, no, they—they don’t care what instrument you

choose.

Father: You sure about that?

Connor: Yeah, they don’t really care which instrument you

choose.
 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 157

Father: Hmm.

I would think they’d want you to continue to progress.

Connor: Yeah, no they don’t—they don’t care.

Besides evincing Connor’s understanding of other minds who “don’t really

care which instrument” he chooses to play, the seamlessness of this interaction
suggests that conversational turn-taking is well mastered by high-functioning children
with ASD. Not all domains of social interaction, however, presented so few
challenges: A less accessible area was formulating situational scenarios (e.g., after a
party, not getting into a friend’s car if the driver is drunk), which rests on awareness of
conventional arrangements of situational roles, actions, and dispositions to infer
participants’ knowledge, intentions, and feelings.

The most challenging domain of sociocultural perspective-taking for children

with ASD, Ochs et al. (2004) argued, was indexicality. The ability to infer indexical
meanings rests on representing and recognizing social situations, and indexical
sense-making relies on the members’ knowledge of conventional associations
between entities in social contexts. Membership in a community requires
understanding the ways in which particular forms of behavior, appearance, artifacts,
and physical environment index the relevant practices, identities, dispositions, and
institutions. The children in the study had least success in inferring practices,
dispositions, identities, and other sociocultural meanings from conventional indexical
forms, although these subtle misreadings were usually ratified by their interlocutors.
Inferring indexical meanings may have been especially challenging because their
potential is wide-ranging and requires awareness of co-occurring salient properties of
circumstances at hand. Ochs et al. (2004) suggested that the high level of competence
in conversational turn-taking was due to the local orderliness of conversational
sequences and turn-taking that was more accessible to a cognitive and
information-processing style of those with autism who thrive on orderliness and tend
to focus on details.

Language, Practical Logic, and Autism

Intrigued by the often seamless participation of high-functioning children

with autism in certain everyday social interaction, Ochs & Solomon (2004)
considered Garfinkel’s and Bourdieu’s perspectives on practice (e.g., Bourdieu,
1990a, 1990b; Garfinkel, 1967) to examine children’s engagement in social
encounters that require fluid, contingent, and practical strategies and behavior. Their
study explored the relation between structure and agency, and between disposition
and practice, showing how autism refracts these relations in theoretically important
ways. Ochs & Solomon discussed evidence from ethnographic observations and
audio and video recordings showing that high-functioning children with ASD have a
heightened awareness of how the mastery of certain social practices is critical for
being perceived as competent at “being a kid.” In the next example, 9-year-old Karl
summons his classroom aide to help him during a math test because he feels that “he
158 SOLOMON

does not know anything.” As the aide approaches, Karl arches his neck to glimpse an
answer from the multiplication table on the wall behind her. She reprimands him:

Aide: And you are [not supposed to be looking up on that

chart.

Karl: [Two

I am not good at being a ki-d.

Aide: You are good at everything you wanna be.

Similar awareness of practical competence was displayed by other children

in the study, especially when they were made accountable by their peers for the hand
flapping and rocking behaviors symptomatic of autism. In these instances, the
children with autism attempted to reframe these behaviors as intentional and
humorous, a kind of a clown act, a disposition that typically developing peers often
did not share. Thus, the children with ASD were able to reflect upon practices as
linked to identities, and attempted to strategically accommodate to normative
expectations, or voiced their frustrations at what they considered their shortcomings.

Because theoretical accounts of autism (i.e., weak central coherence,

impaired executive function, and anomalous ToM) aim to articulate cognitive
processes by which a qualitatively established pattern of impairments is justified,
Ochs & Solomon (2004) considered these theoretical accounts to examine how
autistic impairments may organize children’s social practices when they engage in
everyday interaction. For example, the weakness of central coherence hypothesis is a
theoretical account of autism that attributes its characteristic cognitive and
sociocommunicative profile to an imbalance in information processing that inhibits
integration of information into a coherent hierarchical organization (Frith, 1989;
Happé, 1996; Plaisted, 2000; Shah & Frith, 1993). An ability to perceive and
construct central coherence is critical to understanding cultural systems of
classification and social order, and to participating in everyday conversational
discourse. Such a limitation in central coherence was identified in the discourse of a
number of high-functioning children in the study who engaged in constructing
conceptual paradigms and listing and contrasting members of sets, as illustrated in the
following example. Mary, a 9-year-old girl diagnosed with autistic disorder, is having
a conversation with her mother and father at dinner:

Mary: WHAT’S a NICKNAME?

Mother: You know, like a little fun name.

Mary: The Golden State is a nickname state.

Mother: The [Golden [State is a nickname for?

 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 159

Mary: [State! [CaliFORnia!

[((enthusiastically))

Mother: Mmm hmm!

Mary: And (0.5 sec. pause) the golden poppy is

(pause)

the state flower for

(pause)

CaliFORnia.

Father: That’s right!

Mother: That’s right.

Mary: And I never saw a golden POPPY

Excited by her mother’s explanation that a “nickname” is “like a little fun

name,” Mary proposes “Golden State” as a “nickname state,” a candidate member of
the “nickname” category. Having been asked by Mother a fill-in-the-blank question
with a rising intonation (“The Golden State is a nickname for?”), Mary
enthusiastically replies “State! CaliFORnia!.” This just co-constructed paradigmatic
set (the Golden State is a nickname for California) triggers Mary’s mentioning of
another, similar paradigmatic set that she articulates independently: “the golden
poppy is the state flower for CaliFORnia.” In this dinner interaction, the parents turn
Mary’s interest in categories and conceptual paradigms into a language game
(Wittgenstein, 1958), supporting Mary’s interactional success.

Asking how most of the children in the study seemed able to navigate the
flow of social exchanges, Ochs & Solomon (2004) offered two interrelated
explanations: actor-based and practice-based. An actor-based explanation concerns
properties of the practical actors in the social practices observed, such as the tendency
of family members and other participants to be “generous interlocutors”: to design
their talk and conduct to be comprehensible and interesting to children with ASD, and
to richly interpret the talk and conduct of the children. Such participants usually make
certain that they secure the child’s attention, clarify possible misunderstandings, fill in
missing information, and otherwise promote the child’s social involvement.

A practice-based explanation considered certain fundamental properties of

the social practices underway. The social practices that exhibited certain properties
appeared well within the grasp of high-functioning children with ASD, while other
social practices were more challenging. The children’s social fluency resided
160 SOLOMON

primarily in their ability to act relevantly and generatively in response to locally prior
and upcoming actions. Linking their predications to the propositional content of
locally prior and anticipated utterances was somewhat more challenging. Linking
actions to their own and others’ actions over a more extensive span of social
interaction was significantly more difficult, while the greatest difficulty lay in
grasping more global themes constructed across an extended series of
utterances.

Radical incoherence was rarely observed in the spontaneous interactions

involving high-functioning children with ASD, Ochs & Solomon (2004) wrote,
explaining that the children’s ability to maintain some semblance of relevance was
aided by the relative rather than absolute quality of the concept. Profiting from the
fuzziness of situational relevance, the children in the study routinely maintained
social practices by expressing ideas that were proximally relevant, not quite irrelevant
but also not quite in synch with the focal concern of conversation. Their two
prevailing strategies for making their utterances proximally relevant were to (1) make
the interactional contribution locally relevant to what was just said, but not to the
more extensive concern or enterprise under consideration; and (2) to shift the focus
away from personal states and situations to topically relevant impersonal, objective
cultural knowledge.

Some children mixed the two strategies, proximally relating objective

knowledge to a locally prior move. The examination of social practice through the
prism of autism, Ochs & Solomon (2004) suggested, allows us to see how practical
logic applies to the flow of local and extended actions and propositions which may
present different degrees of accessibility for speakers with and without
neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.

Language, Autism, and the Limits of Habitus

Ochs et al. (2005) continued to examine language and autism, drawing on the
theoretical frameworks of practice theory and language socialization to analyze the
impact of habitus (Bourdieu 1977, 1990a, 1990b) on the communicative development
of children, and especially severely impacted children with ASD. In the practice
theory framework, habitus, a system of socially organized dispositions that enables
people to interpret and creatively engage in the flow of social practices, affords both
regularity and improvisation in social life (Bourdieu, 1990b). In their discussion of
child-directed communication (CDC), Ochs et al. (2005) brought together the
language socialization premise that society and culture organize communication with
children and the practice theory argument that habitus organizes how members
perceive, appreciate, and act in relation to specific situations.

Ochs et al. (2005) proposed a model of CDC that consisted of analytic

dimensions relevant to the dispositions that constitute members’ habitus in particular
sociocultural contexts. These dimensions, variably realized across situations and
communities, include CDC ideologies, habitats, participation frameworks, activities,
and semiotic repertoires. The authors used the model of CDC to analyze how certain
 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 161

sociocultural configurations of CDC may limit or enable children’s communicative

potential. The analysis illustrated how certain dispositions of European American
CDC habitus may compound, rather than minimize, the communicative difficulties
associated with severely autistic children’s impairments: face-to-face body
orientation, speech as the primary semiotic medium for the child, and caregivers’
slowed speech tempo and profuse praise. Face-to-face orientation, for example, is
important for emotion recognition in typical development, but is an area of challenge
in autism (e.g., Baron-Cohen, Campbell, Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, & Walker, 1995).
Slowing down tempo of speech may also be problematic because of the difficulties
with extended courses of actions and with higher-order informational structures. Ochs
et al. (2005) argued that when a child manifests neurodevelopmental impairment such
as autism, the habitus of a speech community may poorly serve the communicative
development of the child, yet mature speakers may find themselves at a loss to
improvise alternative strategies and persist with their default CDC practices.

Alternatively, Ochs et al. (2005) wrote, because habitus is open-ended, it

may be open to potentially radical transformation in crisis situations. When members
feel helpless to cope with situational exigencies presented by symptoms of severe
autism, the members’ sense of order may be undermined. Amid this experiential crisis
that renders all existing CDC practices inefficient, a disciplined, empirical orientation
toward the circumstances sometimes emerges and brings about a shift in habitus. On a
small but significant scale, such a transformation took place first in India and then in
the United States when Soma Mukhopadhyay, a mother of a severely impacted boy
with autism, revised commonly held assumptions about this disorder and initiated an
alternative set of CDC practices attuned to severe autism. These practices included
side-by-side body orientation, pointing to symbols as the primary semiotic medium
for the child, and caregivers’ rapid prompts and restrained praise.

Although not a magic cure that eradicates all symptoms of autism, Soma
Mukhopadhyay’s method positively transformed the life worlds of children and
families. Some of the children with whom Mrs. Mukhopadhyay worked, although still
severely autistic, were able to communicate independently and engage in studies that
were appropriate to their grade level. It was difficult, however, for families to adopt
this culturally different set of CDC characteristics, and some families were reverting
to their original CDC practices. Examining how family members, teachers, therapists,
and others communicate with children with severe autism offered insight into the
limitations of habitus and the capacity of members to transform and to restructure
their CDC dispositions.

Language and Autism: Specific Areas of Language Use

The studies reviewed in this section had distinct analytic foci that examined
language and autism from a range of vintage points. All these studies, however, were
motivated by a specific assumption about language use of children with ASD.

Kremer-Sadlik (2004) pursued contextualization of the theory of mind

account of autism by examining children’s social-cognitive understanding of others’
162 SOLOMON

minds. Her analysis focused on the children’s linguistic performance when answering
family members’ questions during dinnertime. Drawing on spontaneous
video-recorded data, this article analyzed the children’s abilities in reading speakers’
communicative intentions, knowledge, and beliefs, which are embedded in questions,
and in adjusting their responses accordingly. Kremer-Sadlik found that, contrary to
findings in cognitive psychological research, the majority of the time the children
were able to detect their interlocutors’ communicative intentions and produce relevant
responses that were marked by these interlocutors as acceptable. Furthermore, this
research suggested that parents play an important role in facilitating these children’s
access to interlocutors’ intentions, and it examined the different strategies that parents
employ to improve their children’s communicative skills.

In another study, Kremer-Sadlik (2005) critically examined a belief often

held by clinicians that children with autism should not be exposed to multilingual
linguistic environment. Kremer-Sadlik considered the common albeit empirically
unsupported clinical practice of advising multilingual families to speak English only
to their children with ASD regardless of the parents’ English proficiency. Conducting
a series of ethnographic interviews about children’s developmental history and family
language use, Kremer-Sadlik established that the rationale for such clinical
recommendations, as it was understood by the parents, was to ensure their child’s
exposure to the same language inside and outside of the home. This English-only
strategy appeared to be recommended by clinicians to promote a homogeneous and
simplified linguistic environment that in theory was to facilitate language
development in a child with ASD. These recommendations, however, had a
detrimental effect on the children’s opportunities for language development.
Ethnographic observations, video recordings, and interviews with the parents
documented that most families ceased to speak their native languages only when
addressing their child with ASD, but not when speaking among other family
members. Video recordings of family dinnertime unequivocally captured the children
with ASD in multilingual families that followed the English-only recommendation
being linguistically excluded from family conversation. Family members routinely
used their native language with one another while addressing their child with ASD in
heavily accented and grammatically flawed English. Kremer-Sadlik concluded that
such “simplified register” strategy is neither realistic nor productive in that it places
children with ASD at an additional disadvantage by excluding them from social
interactions and denying them the opportunity to actively engage in activities with
others or overhear others’ conversation.

Focusing on children’s engagement in the social lives of their families

through examination of positive politeness, Sirota (2004) expanded current
understandings of the sociocommunicative capabilities and challenges of children
with ASD. Through analysis of spontaneous interactions in family and community
settings, Sirota examined a range of discursive resources used by the children to
accomplish reciprocal positive politeness practices in coordination with others.
Sirota’s practice-based analysis described positive politeness of children with ASD as
a discursive process encompassing both sociocultural and interpersonal knowledge
and skills.
 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 163

Sterponi (2004) examined how children with ASD oriented to norms and
expectations of social conduct. Focusing on rule violation episodes in everyday life,
she showed how high-functioning children with ASD were actively engaged in a
Wittgensteinian language game of accountability, a discursive practice composed of a
set of interrelated moves (Wittgenstein, 1958). Analysis of social rule violations and
transgressions illuminated the children’s mastery in the deployment of social rules as
guides for appropriate conduct. Moreover, Sterponi convincingly showed that
high-functioning children with ASD were sensitive to the moral dimensions of
interpersonal conduct and competently carried out actions evincing sequentially
based understanding of other people’s beliefs and emotions. Sterponi concluded that
participation in discursive social rule violation episodes provides a unique
opportunity for children with ASD to be socialized into socially acceptable conduct
and to learn to think about their own and others’ social behavior.

Solomon (2004) critically reexamined the assumption that children with

ASD are not interested or able to competently participate in narrative discourse. She
analyzed conversational narrative interactions involving high-functioning children
with ASD and their family members to consider the children’s ability to attend to and
make use of contextual information when introducing narratives into ongoing
conversation. The article examined narrative introduction practices to illuminate what
the children oriented to in the flow of conversation, how they interpret it, and what
specific discursive resources they employed to bring about narrative co-telling. The
analysis focused on the children’s management of thematic continuity or
discontinuity with prior talk in narrative introductions relating to personal and
fictional (originating in video games, films, books, etc.) experience. Both the
children’s own contributions in bringing about narrative interaction and their ability to
build upon contributions of others were considered. The article delineated
conversational practices used by the children to introduce narrative interactions into
ongoing talk. The main finding of the study was that high-functioning children with
ASD oriented to thematic continuity as to a locally driven phenomenon and had
preference for narrative introductions that were linked to immediately prior discourse.

Solomon (2004) illustrated that children with ASD were able to proactively
engage in narrative activity with family members, establish themselves as focal
co-participants, and effectively shape their participation over the course of narrative
introduction. Some of the children with ASD adopted highly conventionalized
introduction formats, especially when introducing fictional narratives derived from
books, television programs, feature films, and computer games. Fictional narrative
introductions appeared to be well within reach of children with lower verbal ability
who competently and successfully used the procedurally stable formats afforded by
the global preorganization of these narratives by their modalities of expression (video
recording, printed text, etc.). Narrative co-telling over the extended course of
propositions, however, was more challenging, lending a degree of support to the
theory of weak central coherence. It may be suggested that even when a narrative
introduction as a hierarchically implicative action was achieved successfully, its
global function may not be successfully maintained over the projected propositional
flow. In addition to considering narrative introduction practices, Solomon identified
164 SOLOMON

adaptive conversational practices used by the parents to counterbalance the limitations

of autism that organizes their children’s participation in everyday narrative discourse.

Conclusion

The research studies reviewed in this article provided an ethnographic

perspective on the diverse aspects of linguistic and sociocommunicative abilities and
challenges of middle class children with ASD. The extensive data corpora collected
for the Ethnography of Autism Project constitutes a rich, historical video and audio
archive of the everyday lives of children with ASD at home and at school in an era
when autism was becoming increasingly visible in American public life. Through a
range of analytic foci, these articles examined how the involvement of children with
ASD in schools and families depended on their ability to think, feel, and act as
members of these institutions, and how the children displayed their understandings of
and adherence to practices of social conduct. The studies illuminated the capabilities
of children with ASD to strategically manage the complexities of their social worlds
and the role of family members, teachers, aides, and peers in socializing autistic
children into social competence and an understanding of sociocultural expectations.
Additionally, these studies provided a view of on-the-ground dialogic practices that
promote, and sometimes hinder, the inclusion of children with ASD in the lives of
their families, classrooms and communities.

In future studies, the ethnographic approach described in this article will

contribute to an even more nuanced understanding of ways in which autism,
language, and culture intersect to organize personal experience in childhood and
across life span. It will propel researchers to venture beyond examination of
middle-class childhoods and into other life worlds to illuminate more clearly issues of
autism, language, culture, and social inequality.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research studies described in this article would not have been possible without the collective
pioneering vision of linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs and the late clinical psychologist Lisa
Capps, whose original research on autism emphasized the importance of ethnographic perspective.
The funding for the Ethnography of Autism Project was provided by the Spencer Foundation for
Educational and Related Research (1997–2003 Grants #199800045, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps,
Principal Investigators, and #200100225, Elinor Ochs, Principal Investigator) and by the National
Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation’s postdoctoral fellowship to Olga Solomon
(2004–2006). Additional funding was provided by UCLA Academic Senate and by the Cure Autism
Now Foundation’s Bridge grant program (2005–2006).

Appendix

Transcription Conventions (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984)

. The period indicates a falling, or final, intonation contour, not

necessarily the end of a sentence.
 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 165

?The question mark indicates rising intonation as a syllable or word

ends.
↑ The upward arrow indicates a rising intonation, usually in the middle
of a word.
, The comma indicates continuing intonation, not necessarily a clause
boundary.
::: Colons indicate stretching of the preceding sound, proportional to the
number of colons.
- A hyphen after a word or a part of a word indicates a cutoff or
self-interruption.
word Underlining indicates some form of stress or emphasis on the
underlined item.
(()) Double parentheses enclose transcriber’s comments.
(1.2) Numbers in parentheses indicate silence in tenths of a second.
(.) A dot in parentheses indicated a micropause, hearable but not readily
measurable; ordinarily less than 2/10 of a second.
[ Separate left square brackets, one above the other on two successive
lines with utterances by different speakers, indicates a point of
overlap onset.
WORD Uppercase indicates increased voice volume (loudness).
Word Boldface indicates relevance to the discussion.

ANNOTATED REFERENCES

Kremer-Sadlik, T. (2005). To be or not to be bilingual: Autistic children from

multilingual families. In J. Cohen, K. T. McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J.
MacSwan (Ed.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on
Bilingualism (pp. 1225–1234). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

This investigation addresses the issue of bilingualism and autism in

light of a common clinical recommendation that children with autism from
bilingual families should be addressed in English only to maximize their
language development. Kremer-Sadlik analyzed ethnographic interviews
with parents of children with ASD and video recording of everyday family
interaction to establish that this clinical practice deprives children of not only
their parents’ native language but also any language because the child
becomes linguistically and interactionally isolated. A rare research article
addressing this question from a clinical perspective is Toppelberg, Snow, and
Tager-Flusberg (1999); however, it examines issues of bilingual language
development in relation to a group of severe developmental disorders.

Ochs, E. (2002). Becoming a speaker of culture. In C. Kramsch (Ed.), Language

acquisition and language socialization: Ecological perspectives (pp.
99–119). New York: Continuum Press.

In this article, Ochs mapped the playing field of cultural knowledge

through examination of the children engagement in ordinary activities such
166 SOLOMON

as playing softball during school recess with their peers or taking a math test.
The article applies the language socialization framework to understanding
the challenges and competencies that high-functioning children with ASD
display in everyday interaction.

Ochs, E., & Solomon, O. (2004). Practical logic and autism. In R. Edgerton & C.
Casey (Eds.), A companion to psychological anthropology: Modernity and
psychocultural change, pp. 140–167. Oxford, England: Blackwell.

Ochs and Solomon examined the practice-based paradigms of

Bourdieu and Garfinkel, specifically, the relation between structure and
agency, through the prism of autism. They argued that practical logic is not a
homogeneous domain of competence, but that it presents degrees of
complexity when applied to the flow of local and extended actions and
expressed or implicated propositions. The practical proclivities of children
with autism illuminate the primacy of structure over improvisation.

Ochs, E., Solomon, O., & Sterponi, L. (2005). Limitations and transformations of
habitus in child-directed communication. Discourse Studies, Special Issue:
Theories and Models of Language, Interaction and Culture, 7(4–5), 547–584.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s practice theory and his notion of habitus,

this article critically examines the notion that culture has a solely nurturing
influence on children’s language development. It proposes a dimensional
model of child-directed communication (CDC) to delineate ways in which a
community’s habitus may impede the communicative potential of children
with neurodevelopmental conditions such as severe autism.

Ochs, E., Kremer-Sadlik, T., Sirota, K., & Solomon, O. (2004). Autism and the social
world: An anthropological perspective. Discourse Studies, 6(2), 147–183.

This programmatic article offers an anthropological perspective on

autism and expands the scope of inquiry from the interpersonal domain, in
which autism has been predominantly examined, to the sociocultural one.
The authors argued that persons with autism need to be viewed not only as
individuals in relation to others individuals but also as members of social
groups. The article articulates a sociocultural approach to perspective-taking
in autism in three social domains: participating in conversational turn-taking
and sequences, formulating situational scenarios, and interpreting
sociocultural meanings of indexical forms and behavior. The differential
success across these domains forms a cline of competence, from most
success in conversational turn-taking to least in inferring indexical meanings.
Implications of these abilities and limitations are considered for theoretical
approaches to society and culture.

Solomon, O. (2004). Narrative introductions: Discourse competence of children with

autistic spectrum disorders. Discourse Studies, 6(2), 253–276.
 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 167

This article examines the discourse competence of high functioning

children with ASD to participate in narrative discourse with family members.
The analysis focuses on the children’s efforts to introduce narratives into
conversation. Introductions of both personal experience narratives as well as
fictional narratives (from television programs, computer games, and other
media) are considered.

OTHER REFERENCES

American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of

mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
Atkinson, J. M., & Heritage, J. (Eds.). (1984). Structures of social action: Studies in
conversation analysis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1989). The autistic child’s theory of mind: A case of specific
developmental delay. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 30,
285–297.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baron-Cohen, S. (2000). Theory of mind and autism: A fifteen-year review. In S.
Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, D. J. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding other
minds: Perspectives from developmental cognitive neuroscience. Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press.
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a
“theory of mind”? Cognition, 21, 37–46.
Baron-Cohen, S., Campbell, R., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., & Walker, J. (1995).
Are children with autism blind to the mentalistic significance of the eyes?
British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13(4), 379–398.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990a). In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990b). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Burack, J. A., Charman, T., Yirmiya, N., & Zelazo, P. (2001). Development and
autism: Messages from developmental psychopathology. In J. A. Burack,
T. Charman, N. Yirmiya, & P. Zelazo (Eds.), The development of autism:
Perspectives from theory and research (pp. 3–15). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2007). Time trends in reported
diagnoses of childhood neuropsychiatric disorders: A Danish cohort study.
Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 161, 193–198.
Fombonne, E. (2003). The prevalence of autism. Journal of American Medical
Association, 289, 87–89.
Frith, U. (1989). Autism: Explaining the enigma. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Frith, U., Happé, F., & Siddons, F. (1994) Autism and theory of mind in everyday life.
Social Development, 3(2), 108–124.
168 SOLOMON

Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice

Hall.
Happé, F. (1994). An advanced test of theory of mind: Understanding of story
characters’ thoughts and feelings by able autistic, mentally handicapped, and
normal children and adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders,
24, 129–154.
Happé, F. G. E. (1996). Studying weak central coherence at low levels: Children with
autism do not succumb to visual illusions: A research note. Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry, 37, 873–877.
Happé, F. (2003). Theory of mind and the self. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences, 1001, 134–144.
Kremer-Sadlik, T. (2001). How children with autism and Asperger syndrome respond
to questions: An ethnographic study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
University of California, Los Angeles.
Kremer-Sadlik, T. (2004). How children with autism and Asperger syndrome respond
to questions: A “naturalistic” theory of mind task. Discourse Studies 6(2),
185–206.
Kremer-Sadlik, T. (2005). To be or not to be bilingual: Autistic children from
multilingual families. In J. Cohen, K. T. McAlister, K. Rolstad, &
J. MacSwan (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on
Bilingualism (pp. 1225–1234). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Krug, D. A., Arick, J. R., & Almond, P. J. (1978). Autism screening instrument for
education and planning. Portland, OR: ASIEP Educational.
Le Couteur, A., Rutter, M., Lord, C., Rios, P., Robertson, S., Holdgrafer, M., et al.
(1989). Autism diagnostic interview: A standardized investigator-based
instrument. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 19, 363–
387.
Lord, C., & Spence, S. (2006). Autism spectrum disorders: Phenotype and diagnosis.
In S. O. Moldin & J. L. R. Rubenstein (Eds.), Understanding autism: From
basic neuroscience to treatment (pp. 1–23). Boca Raton, FL: Taylor and
Francis.
Micali, N., Chakrabarti, S., & Fombonne, E. (2004). The broad autism phenotype:
Findings from an epidemiological survey. Autism, 8(1), 21–37.
Muhle, R., Trencoste, S. V., & Rapin, I. (2004). The genetics of autism. Pediatrics,
113(5), 472–486.
Ochs, E. (1982). Talking to children in western Samoa. Language in Society, 11,
77–104.
Ochs, E. (1988). Culture and language development: Language acquisition and
language socialization in a Samoan village. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, E. (2002). Becoming a speaker of culture. In C. Kramsch (Ed.), Language
acquisition and language socialization: Ecological perspectives (pp. 99–
119). New York: Continuum Press.
Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization: Three
developmental stories. In R. A. Shweder & R. A. LeVine (Eds.), Culture
theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion (pp. 276–320). Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
 LANGUAGE, AUTISM, AND CHILDHOOD 169

Ochs, E., & Solomon, O. (2004). Practical logic and autism. In R. Edgerton &
C. Casey (Eds.), A companion to psychological anthropology: Modernity and
psychocultural change. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Ochs, E., Solomon, O., & Sterponi, L. (2005). Limitations and transformations of
habitus in child-directed communication. Discourse Studies, Special Issue:
Theories and Models of Language, Interaction and Culture, 7(4–5), 547–584.
Ochs, E., Kremer-Sadlik, T., Sirota, K., & Solomon, O. (2004). Autism and the social
world: An anthropological perspective. Discourse Studies 6(2), 147–183.
Plaisted, K. C. (2000). Aspects of autism that theory of mind cannot explain. In
S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, D. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding other
minds: Perspectives from autism and developmental cognitive neuroscience
(2nd ed., pp. 222–250). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Ramachandran, V. S., & Oberman, L. M. (2006). Broken mirrors: A theory of autism.
Scientific American, Special Issue: Neuroscience, 63–69.
Sacks, O. (1995). An anthropologist on Mars. New York: Knopf.
Schieffelin, B. (1990). The give and take of everyday life: Language socialization of
Kaluli children. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Schieffelin, B., & Ochs, E. (1986). Language socialization. Annual Review of
Anthropology, 15, 163–191.
Shah, A., & Frith, U. (1993). Why do autistic individuals show superior performance
on the block design task? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 34(8),
1351–1364.
Sirota, K. G. (2004). Positive politeness as discourse process: Politeness practices of
high functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome. Discourse
Studies, 6(2), 229–251.
Solomon, O. (2004). Narrative introductions: Discourse competence of children with
autistic spectrum disorders. Discourse Studies, 6(2), 253–276.
Sterponi, L. (2004). Construction of rules, accountability and normal identity by
high-functioning children with autism. Discourse Studies, 6(2), 207–228.
Toppelberg, C. O., Snow, C. E., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (1999). Severe Developmental
Disorders and Bilingualism. American Academy of Child & Adolescent
Psychiatry, 38(9), 1197–1199.
Walenski, M., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Ullman, M. T. (2006). Language in autism. In
S. O. Moldin & J. L. R. Rubenstein (Eds.), Understanding autism: From
basic neuroscience to treatment (pp. 175–203). Boca Raton, FL: Taylor and
Francis.
Wechsler, D. (1992). Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (3rd ed.). London:
Psychological Corporation.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.