When “Goal!” means ‘soccer’: Verbatim fictive speech as communicative strategy by children with autism and two control groups

Autism is characterized by repetitive behavior and difficulties in adopting the viewpoint of others. We examine a communicative phenomenon resulting from these symptoms: non-prototypical direct speech for non-reports involving an actual utterance from previously produced discourse (e.g. quoting somebody’s words to refer to them, Pascual 2014). We video-recorded the naturalistic speech of five Brazilian children with autism, five typically developing children of the same mental age, and five of the same chronological age. They all used so-called fictive speech (Pascual 2014, Dornelas & Pascual 2016) for narration, expressing needs, and referring to individuals and events (e.g. saying Goal! for ‘playing soccer’). Such verbatim fictive speech originated in specific prior interactions or in socio-communicative or socio-cultural knowledge. We found considerable differences in the three groups in the frequency and degree of creativeness of fictive speech as opposed to it representing standard linguistic formulae or echoing previously produced speech word by word.