Dialogue Skills in Autism. Test Results of 6-7-Year-Old Children in the Intellectual Norm

Abstract

Dialogic skills are an interpretation of the child’s social and communicative development. The basic problem in functioning of autistic children is building alternate social relations and communicating with others, i.e. the development of dialogic skills. The article presents the results of a study of dialogic utterances co-created by 6- and 7-year-old children with autism remaining in the intellectual norm. The research problems included the following issues: whether autistic children co-create dialogues; whether they respect the alternation of the roles of both sender and receiver; whether they implement the linguistic social, situational and pragmatic rules; whether the dialogues they co-create are coherent at the formal, semantic and pragmatic level. The evaluation of dialogue proficiency revealed that autistic children have significant limitations, but also significant potential in conversational abilities. The results of this study indicate the need for dialogue proficiency evaluation in the diagnosis of speech development disorders.