Communication and symbolic research in autism spectrum disorder: linking method and theory.

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Socio-communicative difficulties remain a core diagnostic feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which can have a potentially severe impact on an individual’s daily functioning and pose significant challenges for successfully navigating the unpredictable social world (American Psychiatric Association 2013; Klin et al. 2000). In order to communicate effectively, one must have knowledge of how symbols work, specifically that symbols refer to objects and events and can be used flexibly to represent them. The foundations of communication impairment in ASD relate to divergent pathways towards symbolic understanding, and also to differences in early interpersonal interactions. Here we present a series of 6 papers unified by a focus on symbolic and communication differences in children with ASD, a fundamental and necessary area of research required to inform our understanding and meet the needs of the growing population of individuals on the spectrum who vary in their communicative abilities. The first paper (Lopez) pulls together diverse areas of scholarship and shows the urgent need for compatible literatures to overlap with each other, to solve the problem of how ‘representations’ enter the cognitive system in the first place. She does the admirable job of comparing two approaches that address parallel questions, the neuroconstructivist perspective on development and recent upsurge of analyses of communication problems associated with autism. She makes a strong case that fruitful interaction between areas of scholarship should take place if the field is to move on. She describes areas of research that are not usually in the literature. For example, the studies of how children with ASD manipulate objects (which is part of the intersubjectivity literature) show that they do not seem to approach them in the same way—like picking a teapot up by the spout rather than the handle. This leads naturally to a consideration of how cultural practices impinge on symbol acquisition in both typically developing children and children with ASD. We include Lopez’ article, in particular, because it highlights the need for research on the development of language and gesture in children with ASD to rise to Karmiloff-Smith’s challenge (1998) that such work needs to be truly developmental in order to be informative or insightful. The contribution is as much a call to arms as it is an expression of how the two theoretical perspectives really fit together. Analysis of the emerging language skills of children with ASD who have small vocabularies is notoriously hard. The second paper (Hartley and Allen) reflects meticulous approaches to data collection with minimally verbal participants who have concomitant cognitive impairment. It compares the relative influences of the ‘iconicity’ of a picture in linking an object to its symbolic referent. This is interesting not only because pictures allow us to compare another symbolic system with the effect of words and spoken language, but also because systems like the Picture Exchange Communication System (Bondy and Frost 1994) have been used effectively in forming a link for children with ASD between a word and the object to which it refers (although perhaps an associative one). Pictures do have a resemblance to their referents—they typically have an onomatopoeic quality. It is surprising that so little research has compared pictures and words on a foundational level given this difference between them and the use of pictures in the early education of children with a range of disabilities (see Lancioni et al. 2007). This work also shows the importance of providing data-grounded rationale for the M. L. Allen (&) C. Lewis Department of Psychology, Fylde College, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YF, UK e-mail: melissa.allen@lancaster.ac.uk