Despite its apparent potential, CA is underrepresented in the predominant ASD re-search. To understand the representation of CA in this field, I conducted a demon-strative search on social interaction and gaze in ASD7. The search results show that, for example, in PsycINFO, of the 3096 publications only 13 were conducted using the CA approach, comprising 0,42% of the publications in total (see Table 1). Although it became apparent that not all CA studies were listed in the examined databases, CA-oriented research is nevertheless on the periphery of research on ASD overall.
7 I used the following search words and Boolean operators: (autism OR autistic OR asperger) AND (“social interaction” OR “eye gaze” OR gaze OR gazing). The search was conduced using PsycINFO, ERIC, and Web of Science. CA studies were then searched within the results using the following search words and Boolean operators: (“conversation analysis” OR “conversation analytic”). The search was conducted in August 2016.
However, CA seems to be gaining more popularity and acknowledgement in the field of ASD (e.g. O’Reilly, Lester, & Muskett, 2016), although no exact information on the amount of CA studies on ASD currently exists. To yield a comprehensive view of the previous research utilising the CA approach to study ASD, I reviewed the exist-ing publications8.
table 1: Results of a demonstrative search for studies on gaze and social interaction in asD and the proportion of studies utilising a ca approach
Psychinfo eric web of knowledge
ca research 13 1 6
all research 3096 562 1876
Overall, I was able to identify 97 publications, including 70 journal articles, 20 book chapters, and 7 doctoral theses. As CA as a methodology has a long history in Fin-land, I also searched for publications in the Finnish language that focus on ASD using CA9. Despite the widespread use of CA in Finland, I was only able to locate 1 journal article, 1 book chapter, and 1 doctoral thesis written in Finnish. This is most likely due to the tendency of Finnish CA researchers to publish in English but may also refer to ASD not being in the centre of interest among Finnish CA researchers (however see e.g. Dindar et al., 2017, 2016a, 2016b; Korkiakangas, 2011; Korkiakan-gas et al., 2016; Lehtinen, 2012; Tuononen et al., 2016; Vehkakoski & Rantala, 2012;
Wiklund, 2012).
Despite the underrepresentation of CA within ASD research in general (Table 1), the number of CA studies including participants with ASD has been increasing over the past 20 years, with significant growth observable in the last few years (see Figure 2).
8 Publications were selected if they met the following criteria: (1) included empirical data; (2) were written in English; (3) included one or more participants (of any age) diagnosed with, described as, or evaluated for having ASD or Asperger’s syndrome and/or people who were in close contact with such individuals (e.g. family members, therapists); (4) explicitly focused the analysis on phenomena relevant to ASD; (5) referred to the use of conversation analysis or conversation analytic approach alone or in combination with another approach. Publications that were journal articles, books or book chapters, or doctoral theses were included. I used the following search words and Boolean operators: (autism OR autistic OR asperger) AND (“conversation analysis” OR “conversation analytic”). The search was conducted using PsycINFO, ERIC, and Web of Science. The search was complemented using Google Scholar until a saturation point was reached and no relevant material was found. Furthermore, the reference lists of the identified CA publications, as well as the publication lists of the identified authors, were examined to find additional publications matching the search criteria. The search was conducted in March 2017. A systematic review on this data is in preparation.
9Publications were searched using PsycINFO, ERIC, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and the Finnish databases Finna and Arto. The following search words and Boolean operators were used: (autismi OR autistinen OR autisminkirjo OR asperger) AND (keskustelunanalyysi OR keskustelunanalyyttinen). The search was conducted in May 2017.
Figure 2: the rise of ca studies on asD from 1990 to current (situation in march 2017). note that 2017 has been purposefully excluded from the figure for the sake of not misrepresenting the situation based on the first few months of 2017
These studies have mainly included children who are preschool or school-aged, and have often focused on spoken language. This is to be expected due to the reportedly impaired communication skills of individuals with ASD. For example, 17 of the re-viewed studies have explicitly focused on repetitive talk or specifically on delayed or immediate echolalia. In contrast with the previous research based on the biomedi-cal paradigm, these studies have aimed to examine how echolalia might function as a communicative resource for people with ASD, rather than reflect a symptom of their disorder (e.g. Korkiakangas, Rae, & Dickerson, 2012; Sterponi & de Kirby, 2016;
Sterponi & Shankey, 2013; Stribling, Rae, & Dickerson, 2007; Tarplee & Barrow, 1999).
These studies have analysed in detail how the utterances are placed sequentially to ac-complish specific actions, such as displaying engagement with a social partner’s prior turn (Stribling et al., 2007) and pursuing a response from the social partner (Tarplee
& Barrow, 1999). Thus, they have contributed to the social constructionist view of how interactional competence gets constructed in interaction, while questioning the perception of echolalia as pathology.
In addition to talk, the branch of multimodally informed CA research has focused on embodied practices as sequential contributions to interactions. Such research has shown that some ‘atypical’ behaviours which could be seen as both stereotypical and inherent to ASD, such as tapping movements (Dickerson et al., 2007), ‘problematic’
behaviours (Damico & Nelson, 2005) and ‘inflexibility’ (Muskett, Perkins, Clegg, &
Body, 2010), can be understood as interactional resources when investigated in their local interactional contexts of occurrence. For instance, Muskett et al. (2010) showed how a child with ASD used minimal uptake of her social partner’s turns to prevent influence on her on-going play. Their analysis explicated how such ‘inflexibility’ rep-resents the child’s active attempts to manage the unfolding interaction rather than presenting a symptom of underlying ASD pathology.
Such research has motivated not only this thesis but also encouraged the study of interactional competencies in ASD more broadly. Children’s use of ‘atypical’ re-sources in interaction may, however, cause difficulties for their social partners, who
might find it challenging to interpret and respond to such interactions based on their expectations of the resources typically used in interaction (see Korkiakangas et al., 2016). These difficulties often lead to interactional trouble of some sort. Drawing on the practice of repair (Schegloff et al., 1977), previous CA research on interactional trouble has shown that children can orient to their own conduct as being inadequate to build or maintain mutual understanding (Delves & Stirling, 2010). While children with ASD can use spoken repetitions as a resource to deal with apparent misun-derstandings (Korkiakangas et al., 2012), they may need more attempts to reach mutual understanding compared to their TD peers (Delves & Stirling, 2010; Stirling, Barrington, & Douglas, 2007). Multiple studies have shown that the co-participants often take responsibility for maintaining mutual understanding by modifying their conduct so that it is more accessible for children with ASD (Delves & Stirling, 2010;
Kremer-Sadlik, 2004; Rendle-Short, 2002).
Linguistic asymmetry, whereby one party has more linguistic competence than the other one (Leskelä & Lindholm, 2012), becomes visible in such situations. Often the party who is linguistically more competent can dominate the interactions and in-advertently hinder the participation of the less competent party, such as a participant with ASD. For example, when a linguistically more competent person initiates repair in something that a person with ASD has said, they can make visible for everyone present that they possess knowledge or skills that the other person lacks. However, the linguistically less competent party can also attempt to take control of the interac-tion (e.g. Leskelä & Lindholm, 2012), although research has not usually focused on participants with ASD in the role of an initiator of repair. Thus, little is known about the practices that children with ASD might use to indicate and manage interactional trouble, and relatedly, how co-participants make sense of these practices. This gap has served as a motivation for original article II presented in this thesis.
Interactional trouble can also be caused by challenges in establishing, maintain-ing, or responding to joint attention (as discussed in section 2.1.2). In previous CA research, the explicit focus has rarely been on joint attention and responsiveness to a social partner’s initiating actions, such as pointing gestures, despite the fact that various aspects of joint attention have been routinely examined in research based on the biomedical paradigm. However, Sowden, Perkins, and Clegg (2011) examined the form and function of gestures used in an interaction between a young child with ASD and his support teacher. Their analysis reveals that although the adult used more varied forms of gestures than the child, the child nevertheless used gestures in more complex ways than previously thought, thus contesting the view of children with ASD as impaired in using communicative gestures. However, the study does not focus on the way in which the child responds to the interactional work of the adult’s gestures.
The need to understand in more detail how gestures are used and responded to in interactions with children with ASD motivated the original article III.
In addition to gestures, some multimodally informed CA studies have focused on gaze (Dickerson, Rae, Stribling, Dautenhahn, & Werry, 2005; Dickerson & Robins, 2015; Korkiakangas, 2011; Korkiakangas & Rae, 2014; Robins, Dickerson, Stribling,
& Dautenhahn, 2004; Tuononen et al., 2016; Wiklund, 2012). These studies have ex-amined how children use gaze in social situations. Wiklund’s (2012) study showed that children with ASD use specific strategies to avoid eye contact (e.g. fixing one’s gaze straight ahead) and do not look at their co-participants at the beginning or the middle of their turn, although they do sometimes turn to look at their co-participants at the end of their turn. Dickerson et al. (2005) and Korkiakangas and Rae (2014)
have reported how children have used gaze to mobilise a response from their social partners on asking a question, thereby demonstrating competency to use gaze in line with normative practices.
However, these CA studies have relied on video recordings, which contrasts with experimental eye tracking research. Although video recordings allow rigorous analy-ses to be developed, they are often criticised for a lack of precision in measuring eye movements (Guillon et al., 2014; Zwaigenbaum et al., 2007). Yet, the current eye track-ing studies have not been able to fully capture the interactional contexts in which gaze behaviours occur, something in which the CA approach could make a compelling contribution as it would help inform us how gaze is used in interaction. Eye tracking methodology allows the accurate and objective examination of where (in terms of ‘ar-eas of interests’, AOIs) children shift their gaze (e.g. facial area, hands, legs), wher‘ar-eas the interactional approach can render the temporal and sequential aspects visible:
when gaze occurs and what it accomplishes in interaction. Only a few studies combin-ing eye trackcombin-ing and the CA approach exist (Auer, in press; Hirvenkari et al., 2013;
Holler & Kendrick, 2015; Kendrick & Holler, 2017) and none of them have included individuals with ASD. Original article IV contributes to this gap in the literature and demonstrates some merits of this methodological combination with an interactional live eye tracking study.