by Ulla Sarja

Created on: April 21, 2009

I have been working with children who have been diagnosed as suffering of high funtioning autism or Asperger syndrome during several years. Spoken language has been used when communicating with these children, even if Pictogram have been used as support
when explaining schedules and presentations of activities. I have also used photos, along with social stories, when preparing the child for something that is new or something that is going to happen in the future.

Through my erstwhile mentor I became aware of a new method that she had received good results with. It is a communication method with the help of dolls.There is even a short video sequence about this method.

The purpose of this study is to test how to use the dolls as an intermediary between a social story and reality, that is to clarify and illustrate the social story. The idea is to embody a social story that is trained in a structured and safe environment. What is to be evaluated, is how much weight this intermediary has for the individual's behavior, in this case the individual with autism. The children that I have chosen to study
have the diagnosis Kanners syndrome and are not entirely without language but can not express themself adequately.

The child's early language development

Most children master the basic structure of their mother tongue when they are four years old. This coincides with different cognitive skills which appear to be necessary for language learning. Since the ability to learn languages is unique to humans, this means that by studying the brain and language development in parallel during the first years of human child you can possibly expect to be able to identify the neural mechanisms that are involved in the ability to learn a language. This is not straightforward because some experiments are unethical for use in humans. Therefore, much of the knowledge in the field of research is done on brain injury adults
(Bates, Thal and Janowsky,1992).

The language contains different components; phonetics, phonology, semantics, grammar and pragmatics. Phonetics is the study of language as a physical and psychophysical phenomenon while phonology focuses on the abstract representation below the language perception and production. Semantics can be divided into two parts; lexical semantics and propositionell semantics. The lexical semantics focuses on the importance of words and the propositionell semantics to the entire sentence significance, (Bates et al, 1992).

The child begins to produce sounds

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