Prosodic and nonverbal deficiencies of Finnish- and French-speaking youngsters afflicted with Asperger Syndrome

This project is a linguistic study directed towards the prosodic and nonverbal features characterising the interaction of French- and Finnish-speaking people with Asperger Syndrome. The objective of the study is to find out in what measure the prosodic and nonverbal deficiencies of persons afflicted with AS depend on purely diagnostic factors, and what is the role of language- and culture-specific features in the manifestations of these features.

Choosing to contrast precisely French and Finnish is justified by at least four factors: 1) French and Finnish are unrelated languages (Indo-European vs. Uralic language); 2) there is no close contact between these languages; 3) they are spoken in rather different sociocultural environments; 4) the prosodic structures of these languages are completely different. In addition to comparing the two languages, one of the goals of the project is to acquire new information concerning the connection (the cooperation / the lack of cooperation) between the prosodic and nonverbal means of communication used by people afflicted with AS. Methodologically, the study falls within the framework of Conversation Analysis (CA).

The data will consist of audiovisual recordings from group therapy sessions where 10-15-year-old boys afflicted with AS talk with their therapists. As the mother tongue of the subject is the main variable in this study, only native and quasi-native speakers of Finnish and French will be included. The number of the subjects will be approximately 16-20. Half of them will be native (or quasi-native) speakers of Finnish living in Finland, and the other half will consist of native (or quasi-native) speakers of French living in France.