Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

JESSICA DE VILLIERS, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIAHESITATION PHENOMENA IN THE DISCOURSE OF AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERThis paper investigates hesitation phenomena in the spoken discourse of highfunctioningadolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with particularemphasis on the hesitation fillers um and uh. Hesitation fillers are quite common inspontaneous spoken discourse, and may be signs of planning difficulties (Oomenand Postma 2001) or may function to hold the floor (Maclay and Osgood 1959).However recent work by Clark and Fox Tree (2002) suggests that um and uh mayserve a different function. Drawing on 4 speech genres (Martin 2008), they showedthat speakers systematically make use of these fillers to signal to interlocutors thelength of an upcoming pause, with um signalling a longer pause than uh. Such useof hesitation fillers to signal social information would be unexpected in ASD, whichis frequently characterized as a social communication disorder (Frith 2003), butpreliminary findings (de Villiers in press) suggest that speakers with ASD use thefillers um and uh to signal pause length in systematic ways. The present paperexamines discourses of 35 speakers with ASD and a matched control group toinvestigate the extent to which adolescents with ASD signal pause length usinghesitation fillers in 3 speech genres, and the relationship of this behaviour toneurocognitive function.PAPER SESSION 2E - ROOM 5 - MONDAY, 25 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 95 Lisbon, July 2011