Abstract
This contribution attempts to import the study of autism into the biolinguistics program by reviewing the current state of knowledge on its neurobiology, physiology and verbal phenotypes from a comparative vantage point. A closer look at alternative approaches to the primacy of social cognition impairments in autism spectrum disorders suggests fundamental differences in every aspect of language comprehension and production, suggesting productive directions of research in auditory and visual speech processing as well as executive control. Strong emphasis is put on the great heterogeneity of autism phenotypes, raising important caveats towards an all-or-nothing classification of autism. The study of autism brings interesting clues about the nature and evolution of language, in particular its ontological connections with musical and visual perception as well as executive functions and generativity. Success in this endeavor hinges upon expanding beyond the received wisdom of autism as a purely social disorder and favoring a “cognitive style” approach increasingly called for both inside and outside the autistic community.
Highlights
The present article aims to make the study of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) a chapter of the biolinguistic program, i.e. the study of language as an internal system of human biology (Jenkins 2000)
Event Related Brain Potentials (ERPs) and MEG research on sound-related cortical components and fMRI studies on speech processing in ASD children have begun to refine the relationship between rightward lateralization and development in autistics: Delays in the right hemispheric N/M100 responses to subtle tone contrasts in ASD children are taken as evidence for atypical maturational development of the auditory system in autism generally (Gage et al 2003a, 2003b, Roberts et al 2010)
The present article was an attempt to integrate the study of autism within the framework of the biolinguistic program along two interconnected perspectives, namely that of autism as a cognitive style, on the one hand, and of autism as a heterogeneous set of verbal and nonverbal behaviors outside the realm of social cognition, on the other
Summary
The present article aims to make the study of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) a chapter of the biolinguistic program, i.e. the study of language as an internal system of human biology (Jenkins 2000). ASD involve symptoms and characteristics outside the realm of social cognition, which are addressed by alternative, domain-general and bottom-up approaches to ASD such as enhanced perceptual functioning (Mottron et al 2006), weak central coherence (Happé & Frith 2006) and disruptions of executive functions (Ozonoff et al 1991, Russo et al 2007). We argue that these theories reveal novel and important facts about language in ASD, in particular a generally different mode of language development possibly encompassing all levels of linguistic representation (e.g., phonology, semantics, syntax, in addition to pragmatics), rooted in important differences in neurobiological architecture. We provide a discussion of their implications for the study of language structure and development in autism and hope to demonstrate how the rich, neurophysiologically grounded science of ASD can contribute to intrinsic developmental–evolutionary questions of biolinguistics
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