par Geelhand, Philippine
Président du jury Heinderyckx, François
Promoteur Kissine, Mikhail ;De Villiers, Jessica
Publication Non publié, 2019-09-12
Thèse de doctorat
Résumé : Adequate and efficient participation in a social interaction requires the ability to produce and interpret coherent discourse. Coherence can be achieved using a diverse set of cognitive and linguistic tools such as topic continuity or connectives. On the one hand, successful production of coherent discourse requires the ability to integrate these tools in speech, creating continuity and unity between the sequence of utterances in the discourse. For instance, when telling a story, a speaker can maximize coherence by choosing to mark explicitly the relationships between the events with a connective such as ‘then’, ‘however’ or ‘therefore’. On the other hand, the success of the storytelling will also depend upon the listener’s recognition of these cues and their appropriate interpretation. Failing to produce enough coherence cues or to interpret them as such can lead to communication breakdowns or misunderstandings, potentially compromising the on-going interaction. In a neurodevelopmental disorder like autism, characterized by impairments in social communication, autistic individuals often fail to produce and understand coherent discourse.A plethora of studies have already used discourse analysis to examine discourse (in)coherence and (a)typicality in autistic individuals. However, the studies have been one-sided in terms of methodology, viz. investigating either discourse production or comprehension, but not both. They have also been one-sided in terms of the perspective of the analysis, viz. only considering discourse coherence from the standpoint of neurotypical individuals, without also considering the perspective of autistic individuals. However, social communication is a two-sided dynamic, whereby both communication partners, alternating between the roles of speaker and listener, contribute to the coherence of the unfolding discourse. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to define the qualities of discourse (in)coherence and (a)typicality in autistic adults by combining both detailed transcript analyses and more subjective interpretation of spoken discourse, by both neurotypical and autistic individuals.To achieve these aims, I created a corpus of interviews of 24 French-speaking autistic adults and 24 French-speaking neurotypical adults, matched on gender, age and IQ. The data of three tasks (six and a half hours of speech) collected during the interviews underlie the entire work of this dissertation. Chapter 1 is dedicated to the methodology of the corpus, viz. the data collection, preparation and annotation. On the basis of the annotated data, detailed transcript analyses were performed to examine both the content (Chapter 2) and the delivery strategies (Chapter 3) of spoken discourse in autism. Chapter 2 evaluated the structure of storybook narratives along three central dimensions, viz. the microstructure, the macrostructure and internal state language. The results show that autistic adults produced less coherent narratives than their neurotypical peers, with differences surfacing in all three narrative dimensions, suggesting persistent difficulties in narrative abilities well into adulthood. Chapter 3 addresses a shortcoming of most transcript analyses, viz. lack of prosodic information, by modeling an innovative segmentation procedure, involving the mapping of syntactic and prosodic units, to test the hypothesis that autistic adults use syntax and prosody differently to deliver their speech. The results show that this is indeed the case: autistic adults used a strategy marking relations between utterances implicitly more often than neurotypical adults. In Chapter 4, discourse features identified in transcripts are related with their perception by naïve listeners with and without a diagnosis of autism as well as their contribution to impression formation of the speaker. Results suggest that both autistic and neurotypical listeners were sensitive to the different features identified in transcripts, leading them to judge the discourse of autistic speakers less positively than that of neurotypical speakers. However, this more negative impression of discourse abilities did not influence autistic adults’ perception of mutual understanding and likelihood to become friends, which was the case for neurotypical listeners. Chapter 5 presents serendipitous gender effects, providing new evidence in favor of linguistic camouflage in autistic women.Taken together, this dissertation shows a consistent difficulty in the production of coherent discourse which transpired both in content and delivery strategy. Crucially, reduced discourse coherence resulted in a one-sided ‘neurotypical’ bias towards autistic individuals, which is likely to further hinder their communication success. 

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