Understanding Actions, States, and Events: Verb Learning in Children with Autism

✍ Scribed by Susan Douglas

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 236
• Series: Studies on Language Acquisition [SOLA]; 45
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book explores an understudied area of language development in autism – namely, how children with autism learn the meaning of verbs. The key feature is a profile of verb acquisition in autism derived from qualitative analysis of the conversational language of ten children with autism. Douglas examines whether this profile is typical or atypical compared with verb learning in neurotypical children. Verb use is central to linguistic development, and the ability of children with autism to develop and use verb categories is of interest, because verbs also encode information about the number and type of participants and the temporal location of the activity/event. Moreover, the acquisition of verb meanings is often dependent on other cognitive skills, such as the recognition that human beings have beliefs and desires which motivate their actions. All these are areas which are widely considered problematic for children with autism and continue to generate much discussion among researchers and clinicians. This investigation is among the first studies of its type, offering new insights into the process of language acquisition in autism.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction
1. Motivation for the study
1.1. Theories of word learning
2. The study
2.1. The children
2.2. Communicative abilities of the children
3. Outline of monograph
Chapter 2. What is autism?
1. The emergence of autism as a syndrome
2. Autism: The current perspective
2.1. Autism and behaviour
2.2. Autism and aetiology
2.3. Autism and cognitive abilities
2.4. Autism and language
3. Diagnosis and assessment
4. Conclusion
Chapter 3. Understanding actions, states and events: Verb learning in children in children with autism
1. Introduction
2. Preliminaries
2.1. The study
2.2. Semantic categories
3. Semantic profiles by category
3.1. Activity
3.2. Change of state
3.3. Stative
3.4. Deictic
3.5. Desire
3.6. Emotion
3.7. Perception
3.8. Communication
3.9. Mental state
3.10. Causative
3.11. Abstract
3.12. Modal auxiliaries
3.13. Misuses
3.14. Lexical innovations
4. Overview
4.1. Semantic profile of verb use
4.2. The developmental path of verb acquisition
4.3. Lexical diversity
5. Conclusion
Chapter 4. Understanding space and time: Preposition learning in children with autism
1. Introduction
2. Theoretical background
3. Semantic profiles by category
3.1. Spatial
3.2. Temporal
3.3. Abstract
3.4. Grammatical
3.5. Misuses
4. Detailed examination of the prepositions in, on, up, and at
4.1. In
4.2. On
4.3. Up
4.4. At
5. Overview: Developmental flowchart
6. Conclusion
Chapter 5. Verbs of thought, desire, and speech in grammatical development
1. Introduction
2. Verbs of desire
3. Verbs of cognition
4. Verbs of communication
5. Summary
6. Theory of mind and complex clauses
6.1. Theory of mind development
6.2. Syntactic complements and theory of mind development
6.3. Verbs of communication and theory of mind development
6.4. Complex sentences and theories of language acquisition
7. Conclusion
Chapter 6. Issues and implications
1. Overview of study
2. Semantic development
3. The effect of autism on the interrelatedness of verbs and prepositions
4. Theory of mind and complementation
5. The origin of grammar: A perspective from autism
6. Final comments
Notes
References
Index