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Updated: Sep 20, 2026

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism
Published on: October 3, 2018
The interactional significance of formulas in autistic language
Sushie Dobbinson1, Mick Perkins, Jill Boucher
1York St John College, Lord Mayor's Walk York, UK, YO31 7EX. s.dobbinson@yorksj.ac.uk
Abstract:
The phenomenon of echolalia in autistic language is well documented. Whilst much early research dismissed echolalia as merely an indicator of cognitive limitation, later work identified particular discourse functions of echolalic utterances. The work reported here extends the study of the interactional significance of echolalia to formulaic utterances. Audio and video recordings of conversations between the first author and two research participants were transcribed and analysed according to a Conversation Analysis framework and a multi-layered linguistic framework. Formulaic language was found to have predictable interactional significance within the language of an individual with autism, and the generic phenomenon of formulaicity in company with predictable discourse function was seen to hold across the research participants, regardless of cognitive ability. The implications of formulaicity in autistic language for acquisition and processing mechanisms are discussed.
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