1 Findings from a mind-microscope: Relationships between long- and shorter-term narrative change in autistic speech

In this paper we present an embodied account of increasing coherence in an autistic adolescent’s repeated retellings of a story. Our focus is on the contribution of gestural catchments in the production of a single, multimodal, syntactic construction. The analysis traces the construction’s mesodevelopment in speech and enactment across three days of retellings, from its origin in three separate descriptions of three event sequences, to the merging of two event sequences in a single utterance and then the merging of all three. We suggest that each utterance in the multimodal chain served a constitutive function in the formation of the next, with speech and enactment taking turns “leading the way, ” and that a function of enactment, gesture, and the movements of speech itself is to keep track of spatiotemporal relationships while new linguistic constructions are being formed – either entirely new propositionalizations, or constructions formed from the compression of old ones. A conjecture arising from this analysis is that change across mesodevelopmental time may be of interest for analyses of more typical speech and thought on the microgenetic scale. In our proposed account, mesodevelopmental change serves as a mind-microscope, revealing components of the growth point thinking-for-speaking that are indiscernible across the rapid changes of microgenetic time. We conclude with implications of viewing the autistic adolescent’s linguistic behavior through a mind-microscope, suggesting that ‘mind-blindness ’ was overcome through a combination of character- and observer-viewpoint enactment