A Longitudinal Study for Formation of "Triadic Exchange" with Communication in an Autistic Infant

Many researchers and clinicians have pointed out that one of the major deficits in autistic children is in the area of communication. Communication deficits are a central symptom of the autism syndorome. Communication problems seem to be intertwined with the social and cognitive difficalties that also characterize the autism symdorome. The acquisition of communication ability is one of the most important practical problems in the education for autistic children. This study is one of a series of studies attempting to clarify the communication problems and to seek for the appropriate educational care in autistic children. In the present research, we attempted to analyze the developmental process on formation of triadic exchange with communicative structures of one autistic infant. The subject was a 4-years-old autistic boy. We are training this boy from his 2 years in our class of remedial education for handicapped children. In analyzing his developmental process of communicative structures for about two years, four stages were divided on the basis of the viewpoint from the "dyadic exchange" to the "triadic exchange". At the stages from the first to third, he can contact with objects, manipulate the object and also communicate with his mother, but he can not use any object to communicate with her. This can be named dyadic exchange or two-component relation (infant-object or infant-another person) in communication. At the fourth stage, he can use some means (object or his action) to communicate with another person. This can be called triadic exchange or formation of the three-component relation (infant-object or action-another person) in communication. However, he has still difficulties in the non-verbal communicative abilities such as "joint attention", "empathy" and "pointing". On the basis of these results, we discussed the problem of communicative behavior in autistic infant from the viewpoint of the development of pragmatic communicative functions