Understanding Interactions between Autistic Children and Their Caregivers

We are interested in describing the specific ways that caregivers ‘design’ their talk so that their autistic children are included as participants in the interaction, without having to rely on spoken language. We are also interested in the kinds of things autistic children who have very little spoken language do to participate in interactions with their caregivers. We are analyzing a set of videos of caregivers and young autistic children playing together with toys, that was collected for previous research. Using conversation analysis, we will look for specific things in these videos, like how caregivers pose questions to their children, and what they do if their children don’t respond to their questions or requests for the child to do something.

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