Melis Odabaş Öğe, Conversational Repair Strategies in Adults with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Content Analysis

M.S. Candidate: Melis Odabaş Öğe
Program: Cognitive Science
Date: 26.01.2023 / 14:00
Place: B-116

Abstract: Due to its complexity, Autism Spectrum Disorder provides a wide range of opportunities for academic research, particularly in the area of social cognition. The purpose of this study is to compare the repair strategies used by adults with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) and healthy individuals with similar age-educational status to deal with communication breakdown situations. For this purpose, a discourse corpus was compiled by analyzing video recordings of individuals with ASD and those in the control group performing a joint task under two distinct conditions, in which they were paired with either the acquainted or the experimenter. During the task, the partners solved a series of tangram puzzles on the shared task environment, which they accessed through the computer screens in front of them. During this task, where only the participant playing the role of the narrator could see the target figure, the other participant attempted to place the pieces according to the narrator's instructions. The purpose of this experimental setup is to create a suitable interaction environment for the examination of speech repair strategies and elaboration requirements by placing the participants in a situation in which they must instruct and follow one another. On the transcripts generated for the study, content analysis was performed, and the participants' repair expressions were coded and subjected to statistical analysis. The results indicate that the OSB group's expressions contained more repair initiation constructs than those of the control group. Self-repair expression was observed to be more prevalent in the ASD group than partner-initiated repair expression. In both the ASD and control groups, it was observed that as partners got accustomed to the task and each other, they solved the puzzles faster and used fewer expressions.