Abstract:

The Ecological Referential Communication Paradigm (ERCP) studies communication by focusing on the referential communicative exchanges that occur between pairs of participants with the help and under the guidance of an adult. The study of Referential Communication skills constitutes an area of study in its own right within the current scene of communication science, since it deals with prototypically pragmatic skills. Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit difficulties in their pragmatic abilities, and for this reason the present paper aims to evaluate this particular type of communicative competence among this target population. Research output that implements this methodology on behalf of persons with ASD is scarce and they do not differentiate by gender. Our paper, therefore, attempts to evaluate girls and female teenagers with ASD. The study sample consisted of 5 cases involving girls with ASD.

The evaluation was carried out on the basis of a typical Ecological Referential Communication task inspired by the ERCP. Method: The results were obtained through descriptive analysis of response frequencies and enable us to highlight the existence of certain ambiguity concerning the utterance of Referent Objects (O), which increases when participants communicate the Basic relation (DL). Furthermore, both the First relation (R) and the Second relation (R1) are mostly omitted, although some degree of ambiguity is also detected. Finally, none of the participants mentioned the Position (Pt) for any of the referent objects that were presented to them in the task so that they could communicate them to the other girl receiving their messages. These findings regarding ambiguity and omissions in the messages exchanged between the participating girls with ASD are a great contribution to the literature, since they support the gender-based study of the subjects' communicative profile. Moreover, the results of this study are useful insofar as they underpin the importance of evaluating this communicative competence and emphasize, in the case of female subjects, a more detailed assessment of the omissions and ambiguity in the messages delivered to the interlocutor.

In conclusion, this approach will enable the design of more adapted interventions by addressing one of their "weak points", i.e., language. In addition, it will help us tackle the most outstanding communicative difficulties (omissions and ambiguity) while helping us focus our interventions less on the possibility that subjects provide information rated as "wrong", since such coding has not been found in any of the messages analyzed in this pioneering study. Looking to the future, it will be desirable to work with a higher number of female participants so as to be able to confirm, on the basis of a greater sample power, the generalizability of these preliminary findings. By proving both useful and necessary, the contribution of this paper paves the way to a new avenue of future research.

Keywords:

Autism Spectrum Disorder, Women, Referential Communication, Evaluation, Intervention.