A Dynamical Systems Approach to Pragmatics Language Impairment in Autistic Children: Trapped Trajectory in a Bottleneck

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) refers to a wide range of circumstances characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, language, and nonverbal communication. While structural language is known to vary broadly in children with ASD, pragmatic language has been claimed to be consistently impaired within this population. To have a better understanding of language development and the related impairments, ”dynamical systems theory” can be helpful. Language development, as a dynamic system, has a trajectory of variations. For autistic individuals, we hypothesize that this trajectory reaches a bottleneck in higher-level aspects of language like pragmatics. The language development trajectory of autistic children typically passes the lower-level aspects of language such as semantic/lexicon processing. But, it slows down when reaches higher levels like pragmatics and traps in a bottleneck. It means that the trajectory spends lots of time in this stage and cannot fully complete the stage to acquire pragmatic competence. The time that the developmental trajectory spends in the bottleneck is related to the environmental and social conditions of the children with ASD. Appropriate intervention packages can lower the trapping time in bottleneck by improving social and environmental circumstances and making the trajectory faster.