Study On The Conversational Ability Of Children With Mild Autism In The Context Of Mother-child Conversation

In recent years, the development of the conversational skills, which is important for children with mild autism, has been paid more and more attention. Mothers, as intimate interaction partner of mild autism children, have an important influence on the development of their conversational ability. But there are few studies focus on the child-mother conventional ability of mild autism children. At the same time, the conversational ability is significantly related to their vocabulary level. And a comparative study between Normal Children and Mild Autism Children by matching vocabulary levels, can eliminate the impact of vocabulary levels and reflect the Mild Autism’s conversational characteristics more clearly. Therefore, based on the review of existent studies, the present thesis decide to compare the child-mother conversational ability between normal children and mild autism children in the same vocabulary level by using both quantitative method and qualitative method.The present thesis chose 21 mild autism children in Rehabilitation Center from N-City and J-City, and 21 ordinary children who have the same vocabulary level with the mild autism children in a kindergarten from N-City as the object of this research,and collected their conversation with their mothers in four contexts which are free talking, building blocks, drawing and reading books. After transcribing the video and coding the data,the author analysis children’s conversation ability from four aspects,including turn-taking ability, conversation-initiating ability, conversation-maintaining ability, and conversation-repairing ability.The research draws to the following conclusions: a) Mild autism children have the same structure of conversational ability with ordinary children, but they perform worse in the development level of conversational ability, especially in the conversation-maintaining ability. b) There is no difference in the frequency of turn-talking between mild autism children and normal children, but the mild autism children are weaker in the rules of turn-talking. c) There is no difference in the number of conversation-initiating between the children with mild autism and normal children, but the mild autism children make more failures when initiated. d) The frequency of conversation-maintaining in children with mild autism is significantly lower than that of ordinary children. What’s more, mild autism children maintain the conversational in a more passive way, and they performed worse in information interaction. e) Mild autism children repaired less in the child-mother conversational and the repair types they used are easier. In addition, the mild autism children repair conversational inappropriately .Above all,suggestions that how to improve children’s conversational ability in the practice are as follows:a) Strengthening the consciousness of turn-taking-rules of mild autism children,which include: 1) Training the "turn" consciousness of children with mild autism. 2)Give them the obvious reminder in the end of the turn. 3) Enhance the feedback ability of mild autism children.b) Improving the quality of the mild autism children’s conversation-initiating,which include: 1) Triggering the initiation of them by making full use of intermediates.2) Triggering the initiation of them by creating a challenging situation.c) Developing the information interaction ability of children with mild autism,which include: 1) Being aware of the mild their interest,and communicating with them in the appropriate time. 2) Improving their ability of searching information by strengthening the sentence training. 3) Responding moderately to improve the ability of providing information.