A Comparison of the child-directed speech of mothers with typically developing children and mothers of children with ASD

The study I wish to present is my undergraduate dissertation, which is a comparison of the child-directed speech of mothers of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and mothers of typically developing children in terms of syntactic categories and functional usage. I will also complete an analysis of the responses given by the children to each of the different categories. This paper was inspired by my work with both verbal and non-verbal children with ASD as a respite carer. This paper uses data from the CHILDES Clinical corpus on language disorders, from Janet Bang and Aparna Nadig (2013) from which I have used 4 transcripts from the mother-child dyads containing children with ASD and those containing typically developing children. The transcripts were chosen by matching the children for their mean length of utterance and the using chronological age as a secondary criterion. The functional analysis will follow the Pragmatic/Mathetic distinction set forward by Michael Halliday (1975) and in my presentation I will discuss my choice of this theory over others. The syntactic analysis will be repeating the analysis perform by Thea Cameron- Faulkner et al. (2003). Though I have not yet completed the analysis of my data, preliminary analyses seem to show that mothers of children with ASD tend to use more pragmatic utterances and imperatives which was expected after previous reading and experience but also though questions on a whole are more prevalent in both groups, it seems that Yes/No type questions are favoured over Wh-type questions though it is too early in my investigation to propose any reasons as to why.