Monday, June 28, 2010

Linguistic Structure and Overcoming the Barriers of Autism

Bullshitters rely on, perhaps more than any other thing, the structure of language. If someone doesn't know the exact meaning of a particular word, a vague meaning can be constructed if the word has been heard before in conversation because such a context often serves as a pointer arrow directing inquiring minds towards an unknown word's meaning.

Can this be taken a step further? What I mean by this is can one figure out what a whole part of a language (that refers to a specific domain) is simply by making inferences about its structure as it relates to the structure of other parts of the language? This may be confusing, though I think I can ground it by giving the example that got me started on this whole line of thinking.

I work with autistic adults as my job. Some (like Simon Baron-Cohen) have theorized that autism is the absence of an understanding of mental states which leads to problems with communication, social interaction, and imagination.

In line with this theory is the fact that many autistic people have very inhibited language abilities, though some come to have an impressive command over language. Several of the people that I work with fall into this category, and I often find myself wondering what sense they make of those parts of language that refer to mental states. In my experience they don't use these parts of the language outside of situations in which they've been explicitly taught to do so by rote.

Perhaps it's possible that the structure of language could serve as a guide towards the (admittedly artificial) construction of mental concepts in high functioning autistic people who have well developed language abilities. The existence of the linguistic domain of mental terms would not be initially understood, but this is no reason to believe that its structure would escape a careful mind. This structure would exist both within this domain (intrastructure) and between this and other domains (interstructure).

In the coming days, I hope to find out more about how this structure may aid in the acquisition of mental concepts, or something like them...

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