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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ... iv Introduction ... 2 Chapter 1: Methodology ... 10 I. Corpus description ... 10 II. Methodology ... 10 2.1. Participants ... 10 2.2. Procedure... 11 2.3. Material ... 12 2.4. Data preparation ... 14Chapter 2: Narrative production in autistic adults ... 31
I. Introduction ... 31
1.1. Narrative discourse as a measure of language use in autism ... 31
1.2. Characteristic of narrative discourse in autism ... 34
1.3. Age and narrative performance ... 35
II. Methodology ... 37 2.1. Participants ... 37 2.2. Material ... 38 2.3. Procedures ... 39 2.4. Linguistic measures ... 39 2.5. Data preparation ... 43 2.6. Analysis ... 44 III. Results ... 45 3.1. Narrative microstructure ... 45 3.2. Narrative macrostructure ... 51
3.3. Internal State Language ... 61
3.4. Summary of coding results ... 65
IV. Discussion ... 66
V. Conclusion ... 70
Chapter 3: How do autistic adults use syntactic and prosodic cues to manage spoken discourse? ... 76
I. Introduction ... 76
vii 2.1. Participants ... 84 2.2. Material ... 85 2.3. Procedure... 86 2.4. Analysis ... 87 III. Results ... 87 3.1. Syntactic coding... 87
3.2. Basic discourse units ... 94
3.3. Summary of results ... 98
IV. Discussion ... 99
V. Conclusion ... 104
Chapter 4: Relating corpus findings to their impressions by naïve listeners ... 107
I. Introduction ... 107 II. Pretest ... 111 2.1. Methodology ... 111 2.2. Analysis ... 114 2.3. Results ... 114 2.4. Summary of results ... 115
III. Auditory Rating Experiment ... 116
3.1. Methodology ... 116
3.2. Analyses ... 118
IV. Results ... 118
4.1. Full Scale ... 118
4.2. Subscale on discourse content ... 120
4.3. Subscale on speaker impressions ... 122
4.4. Summary of results ... 125
V. Discussion ... 126
VI. Conclusion ... 127
Chapter 5: Serendipitous findings ... 130
I. Introduction ... 130
II. Results... 131
2.1. Participants ... 131
2.2. Syntactic coding and BDUs ... 131
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III. Discussion ... 138
Chapter 6: General Discussion ... 141
References ... 149
Appendix 1 : Guidelines for orthographic transcription (French Version) ... 161
Appendix 2 : Annotation guidelines for narratives (French Version) ... 164