La descompensación entre las habilidades de carácter gramatical y pragmático en el discurso oral de niños con síndrome de asperger

Abstract

The present study starts from the premise that the linguistic skills of grammatical nature involved in speech production of children with Asperger syndrome are shown intact or unaltered, whereas most of the dysfunctions in the discursive dimension are associated to specifically pragmatic skills. This idea is compatible with the underconnectivity theory, according to which there would be a neuro-physiological correlate capable of explaining such discrepancies between grammatical and pragmatic skills. Likewise, it is considered that communicative dysfunctions in Asperger syndrome may be due to an integration deficit. In order to support these assumptions, the analysis of different categories is carried out; more exactly, grammatical skills (syntactic complexity and lexical diversity, cohesion and coherence) are compared to pragmatic skills (principle of cooperation and editing tasks). For this, forty recordings transcribed in CHAT format (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts) were taken into account. Twenty of them came from speakers with Asperger syndrome, and the other twenty, from speakers without this disorder. The results of this analysis reinforce the starting point of the paper, according to which there would be clear dissonances between the structural abilities of language and the communicative ones. Finally, with the ambition to reach a greater comprehension about communication disorders, particularly about Asperger syndrome, this research seeks an interdisciplinary connection.