Many accounts of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) imply that the condition's behavioural 'symptoms' are direct reflexes of underlying deficits. In doing so, however, they invariably overlook the social contexts in which symptomatic behaviours occur and are identified as pathological. This study addresses this issue, using conversation analysis (CA) to examine the emergence of inflexibility, a behavioural trait symptomatic of ASD, during play involving an adult and diagnosed child. We argue that 'inflexibility' is the product of the child's strategic attempts to retain control over the unfolding interaction, within a context where such attempts breach normative expectations about adult-child play. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the adult does not resist these attempts, on occasion even explicitly providing opportunity for subsequent inflexibility. This challenges the assumption that ASD's behavioural profile solely represents the endpoint of underlying deficit, and demonstrates how 'non-impaired' speakers can be implicated in the manifestation of symptomatic behaviours.

Research into lexical retrieval requires pictorial stimuli standardised for key psycholinguistic variables. Such databases exist in a number of languages but not in Arabic. In addition there are few studies of the effects of psycholinguistic and morpho-syntactic variables on Arabic lexical retrieval. The current study identified a set of culturally and linguistically appropriate concept labels, and corresponding photographic representations for Levantine Arabic. The set included masculine and feminine nouns, nouns from both types of plural formation (sound and broken), and both rational and irrational nouns. Levantine Arabic speakers provided norms for visual complexity, imageability, age of acquisition, naming latency and name agreement. This delivered a normative database for a set of 186 Arabic nouns. The effects of the morpho-syntactic and the psycholinguistic variables on lexical retrieval were explored using the database. Imageability and age of acquisition were the only significant determinants of successful lexical retrieval in Arabic. None of the other variables, including all the linguistic variables, had any effect on production time. The normative database is available for the use of clinicians and researchers in the Arab world in the domains of speech and language pathology, neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. The database and the photographic representations will be soon available for free download from the first author's personal webpage or via email.

Narrative discourse tasks are a common feature of assessment and research after traumatic brain injury (TBI) and other types of brain damage. Although stimulus materials and analysis methods have been developed from a variety of theoretical perspectives, many do not challenge cognitive-linguistic skills sufficiently to highlight individual difficulties in assessment after TBI. This study employed a complex story recall task and it aimed to develop analysis methods that were sensitive to differences in recalled narratives and which could be validated against the perceptions of external raters. Twenty TBI adults and 20 matched control subjects were tested and their narratives analysed in terms of six measures (T-units, Noun:Pronoun Ratio, Scenes, Errors, Comments and Tentative Statements). Two groups of raters (one professionally trained, the other not) judged the transcribed narratives on ratings of Content and Clarity. Multiple regression analyses established that two of the linguistic measures in combination predicted ratings of Content, while a further three in combination predicted ratings of Clarity. Cut-off scores were established in order to categorize the TBI and control subjects' performance. The validated measures provide the foundation for analyses of complex narrative as a means of assessment after TBI.

Topic repetitiveness is a common component of pragmatic impairment and a powerful contributor to social exclusion. Despite this, description, characterization and intervention remain underdeveloped. This article explores the nature of repetitiveness in traumatic brain injury (TBI). A case study of one individual after TBI provides the basis for a conceptualization of topic repetitiveness in terms of two major strands of thinking in pragmatics. Firstly, it is viewed as an emergent response to underlying deficits in non-linguistic abilities. Secondly, it is described in terms of joint management of topic development between the person with TBI and his interlocutor.

Within the domain of inflectional morpho-syntax, differential processing of regular and irregular forms has been found in healthy speakers and in aphasia. One view assumes that irregular forms are retrieved as full entities, while regular forms are compiled on-line. An alternative view holds that a single mechanism oversees regular and irregular forms. Arabic offers an opportunity to study this phenomenon, as Arabic nouns contain a consonantal root, delivering lexical meaning, and a vocalic pattern, delivering syntactic information, such as gender and number. The aim of this study is to investigate morpho-syntactic processing of regular (sound) and irregular (broken) Arabic plurals in patients with morpho-syntactic impairment. Three participants with acquired agrammatic aphasia produced plural forms in a picture-naming task. We measured overall response accuracy, then analysed lexical errors and morpho-syntactic errors, separately. Error analysis revealed different patterns of morpho-syntactic errors depending on the type of pluralization (sound vs broken). Omissions formed the vast majority of errors in sound plurals, while substitution was the only error mechanism that occurred in broken plurals. The dissociation was statistically significant for retrieval of morpho-syntactic information (vocalic pattern) but not for lexical meaning (consonantal root), suggesting that the participants' selective impairment was an effect of the morpho-syntax of plurals. These results suggest that irregular plurals forms are stored, while regular forms are derived. The current findings support the findings from other languages and provide a new analysis technique for data from languages with non-concatenative morpho-syntax.

Semantic verbal fluency (SVF), a psychological assessment method used in experimental research and clinical practice, requires participants to produce as many words as possible from a given superordinate category (e.g., “animals,” “vehicles”). Features of responses, such as the prototypicality and ordering of items, are then interpreted as if revealing details about the organisation—or, in instances of ostensibly atypical performance, disorganisation—of participants’ underlying conceptual and/or semantic systems. In this paper, we draw upon perspectives from Discursive Psychology, particularly the work of Derek Edwards (e.g., Edwards, 1997), to argue against this position. Following critical discussion of SVF’s strongly cognitivist theoretical foundations, we present analyses of social interactions across various contexts, including the real-life administration of the paradigm with a child with autism, to suggest that performance is unavoidably socially mediated rather than solely internally driven. Our arguments challenge SVF’s validity and its role in the description of “cognitive disorder.”

Research into anomia has been carried out in English and many Indo-European languages extensively, but not in Arabic. Previous studies have investigated predictors of successful lexical retrieval after anomia, and access to syntax during lexical retrieval. The aim of the current study is to examine impaired lexical retrieval in Arabic at two levels: predictors of lexical retrieval, and access to syntax during lexical retrieval, via checking whether syntactic cueing (using the definite article /əl-/ 'the' prior to nouns) facilitates noun retrieval in Arabic aphasia, with regard to naming speed and accuracy, and establishing the determinants of aphasic noun retrieval in Arabic. Three participants with anomia following CVA named 186 pictures from a published Arabic database in two conditions: bare noun condition, and determiner + noun condition. Participants' accuracy and reaction times were compared in both conditions. Furthermore, a multiple regression analysis was carried out to test the effect of psycholinguistic variables (visual complexity, name agreement, age of acquisition, imageability and other intrinsic variables) on successful lexical retrieval to determine predictors of Arabic noun retrieval after anomia. The production of the determiner + noun in picture naming facilitated spoken naming in all three participants. Nouns produced with the determiner were produced faster and more accurately than their counterparts produced without the determiner. The two participants with agrammatism produced morpho-syntactic errors in the bare noun condition, but not in the determiner + noun condition, suggesting that the determiner sets up a noun phrase frame with a slot for the noun to be filled, resulting in responses that are faster and more accurate. Age of acquisition and imageability were the only two variables that had influence across the participants. These results have theoretical and clinical implications for lexical retrieval models.

Traditional approaches to standardized assessment are underpinned by the assumption that between-assessor variation in delivery can effectively be eliminated. However, fine-grained analyses of the administration of such assessments (e.g. Maynard and Marlaire, 1992 ) have established that significant subtle interactional variations occur even in procedures with regimented protocols, and that such variations can demonstrably affect examinee performance. In this article we draw upon the Vygotskian thinking that underpins dynamic assessment (DA) to posit that these spontaneous variations may provide clinically relevant information about an examinee’s learning potential. To illustrate this possibility, we apply the methodology of conversation analysis to examine a real-life picture-naming task involving a child with autism. Complex interactional processes above and beyond what might be assumed to occur during assessment are identified. In interpreting these as significant for a deeper understanding of the child’s profile of abilities, we argue that there is clinical value in empirically re-examining routine assessment from alternative methodological perspectives.