Topic Continuity in Children with Autism in Korean

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the structure and acquisition of topic continuity in Korean‐speaking normally‐developing and autistic children’s naturalistic speech. Specifically, we are interested in investigating a set of questions, as follows：First, what structural mechanism is at work for Korean topics to be continued?; Second, how is the topic continuity mechanism acquired by the normally‐developing children vs. autistic children? And thirdly, what could be done for us to help autistic children to develop pragmatic knowledge? Based on our major findings, it is concluded that topic continuity in Korean is governed by both pragmatic and morpho‐syntactic principles such as topic recoverability and morpho‐syntactic focusing. Second, while the autism literature has frequently reported on the autistic children’s pragmatic deficits, our studies seem to suggest that they can gradually develop sensitivity to topic recoverability. It is concluded that, provided with discourse‐pragmatically enriched information, autistic children would develop further, and that it is hoped that their acquisition of topic continuity will further be facilitated as they become sensitive to the morphosyntactic features of Korean verb modality, ultimately.