Metacommunication, social pretend play and children with autism

Abstract

This article investigates proceses of engagement in social pretend play between children with autism (age range 3.6 to 7.2 years) and adult play partners, using a large corpus of conversational data. We take a qualitative discourse analytic approach to investigate the metacommunicative strategies used by the children. Our initial framework for exploring these issues is Giffin's (1984) model of verbal and nonverbal metacommunication in sociodramatic pretend play, and we develop this model further by proposing a cline of engagement along which we situate the children in our study. We found that, while all the children do participate in pretend play, and engage with the adult play partners to at least some extent, the children vary in the range of metacommunicative strategies they use, and in the degree to which they negotiate the creation of play sequences with their interlocutor. Furthermore, even for the most competent children, the metacommunication exhibits atypical characteristics.