A Study Of Multimodal Referential Behavior In Oral Narratives Of Chinese Children With Autism

Autism Spectrum Disorder（ASD）is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social communication abilities with restricted and repetitive behaviors.Referential behavior in autistic children,which is a common occurrence in their daily social interactions,is an ongoing topic of interest in the domains of linguistics,psychology,neurobiology and special education.Existing literature proposes that referential events draw upon linguistic,social,pragmatic and cognitive resources,and that the improvement of referential ability contributes to more cohesive discourse and better communication skills.However,the bulk of empirical research in the past decades has focused primarily on the verbal ability in autistic children,therefore it fails to achieve a comprehensive understanding of children’s communicative competence.In view of the above-mentioned facts,current research explores multimodal referential behaviors in the self-building multimodal narrative corpus in a threedimensional analytical framework of entity,realization and evaluation.In the dimension of entity,the research approaches it from the perspectives of real-world entities,entities of discourse and psychological representations of entities.At the realization level,it focuses on how linguistic modes,referential gestures and referential gazes work together to achieve communicative goals.The third and final layer consists of descriptive and interpretive evaluation.The descriptive evaluation focuses on both appropriate and inappropriate referential behaviors while the interpretive one sets out to explicate these different referential behaviors from the cognitive factors of executive function and embodied cognition.The above three dimensions correspond respectively to the three fundamental characteristics of referential behaviors: referential entities,referential strategies and communicative effects.Based upon the proposed analytical framework,the current study presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis between children with autism spectrum disorders（ASD）and typically developing children（TD）in terms of their referential behaviors in Chinese oral narratives.The study constructs a scheme for corpus annotation,annotates the referential behaviors present in the corpus data and then quantifies the annotation results.The comparative analysis focuses on the following six aspects: referential strategies of different types of entities,referential strategies of different referential functions,interaction between different modes,referential strategies in reporting behaviors,referential repair behaviors and inappropriate referential behaviors.The major findings are listed as follows:（1）Generally speaking,the frequency of animated character references is the highest in both groups,followed by references to objects and places;time-related referencing behaviors are the least frequent.The referential strategies adopted by both groups are largely verbal expressions.The integration of referential expressions,referential gestures and referential gazes is secondary to verbal means,and the integration of referential expressions and referential gestures is relatively less.（2）With regard to the referential entity type,referential functions and represented discourse,the similarities between ASD and TD are as follows: a)Multimodal referential strategies are most commonly adopted to refer to shared entities,while mutually exclusive entities are referenced the least;b)In regard to the characteristics of animacy and definiteness,the use of definite referential strategies is consistent with the animacy hierarchy;c)Regarding the referential function and definiteness,the use of definite referential strategies is consistent with the degree of recognition of referential objects and the brain’s state of activation;d)Represented discourse is most common in shared entities and the least common in mutually exclusive entities.The main differences are as follows: a)Autistic children tend to use the referential strategies of definite noun phrases or the multimodal strategies of definite noun phrases using nonverbal means;b)Ambiguity is far more salient in referential introductions and reintroductions;c)In the represented discourse,autistic children use more zero-form referential strategies from the entity’s perspective.（3）As for the interaction between each mode,the linguistic expressions are mostly adopted by both groups to indicate the referent.In addition to the verbal means,autistic children are more inclined to resort to the nonverbal modalities of referential gesture and referential gaze;Meanwhile,multimodal referential strategies in which three modes play an equal part are also frequently adopted by autistic children.（4）Regarding the communicative effects of the referential behaviors,the similarities between two groups are as follows: a)Improper referential behaviors are most evident in contexts in which the narrator is in the privileged condition while improper referential behaviors decline the most when both parties are in the same context;b)With regard to the type of improper referential behaviors,referential vagueness is the most common;c)The most common repair strategy is self-initiated and manifests as self-repair through verbal means;d)While a referent that is shared by both parties is easily ignored,human entities are the least likely to be ignored by both parties.As for the differences,the autistic children exhibit more improper referential behaviors and fewer self-initiated repair behaviors;they also tend to ignore repairs initiated by others,resulting in a greater number of communication breakdowns.In addition,unshared entities are more likely to be ignored by autistic children.Taken together,the autistic children in this study were successful in choosing referring forms that enable their listeners to infer the entities to which they refer.Nonetheless,several significant differences between typically developing children can be identified by their use of appropriate referential strategies,multimodal interaction and the repair of communication barriers.The above deficiencies suggest that those with ASD are impaired in two cognitive abilities: embodiment cognition and executive function.With respect to embodiment cognition,individuals with ASD have difficulty interacting with referential entities—especially through the body language they employ in communicative contexts.The relative decrease or lack of embodiment manifests itself through improper interactions between verbal and non-verbal modes.In addition,ASDs with executive dysfunction fails to replace older information with newer and more relevant information or else they adapt referential behaviors in response to changes in the communicative context.This results in a greater number of referential inadequacies compared with typically developing（TD）children.Narrative ability is closely related to a child’s future academic achievement.The present research into referential behavior in children provides a guideline for the proper cultivation of children’s narrative ability.It also provides a good way in which to measure communicative competence both in typical populations and in clinical groups.Finally,it makes an attempt to propose a 3V model-based intervention for autistic children to foster their referential abilities.It is expected to broaden the new field of intervention research on children with ASD and provide enlightenment in the improvement of rehabilitation training in skills related to multimodal communication competence.