Mari Wiklund

University of Helsinki | HY · Department of Languages

Background: In this article, we analyze a group therapy session involving four 11- to 13-year-old French-speaking boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their two female therapists. We focus on speaking turns in which the therapists reformulate the contents of a preceding turn produced by a child. Method: Methodologically, the study is based...

Tämä artikkeli käsittelee autismikirjon varhaisnuorten puheen prosodian havaittua epätyypillisyyttä. Kyseessä on pilottitutkimus, jonka aineisto koostuu viiden 11-13-vuotiaan suomea äidinkielenään puhuvan autismikirjon pojan ja kuuden samanikäisen neurotyypillisen pojan puhenäytteistä. Puhenäytteet on kerätty spontaanista puheesta. Aineiston pohjal...

The studies on comprehension problems carried out within the framework of this project (Lehtinen, 2012; Wiklund, 2016; Wiklund & Laakso, 2019, 2020) confirm the results of previous studies (e.g., Geller, 1998; Keen, 2003), according to which children with ASD often experience communication breakdowns in their interactions. Unlike previous studies,...

Speech disfluencies interrupt the continuous flow of speech and may thus present challenges for conversational interaction. In fluent speech, there are few interruptions, and listeners can concentrate on the contents of the speech without being disturbed by the manner in which the speech is produced. ‘Disfluency’ refers to the interruption of ongoi...

People with ASD often exhibit atypical non-verbal behaviours, which are often manifested by avoiding eye contact. Gaze constitutes an important interactional resource, and a person’s tendency to avoid eye contact may affect the fluidity of conversations and cause misunderstandings. It is therefore important to know precisely the ways how this avoid...

‘Prosody’ encompasses phenomena related to aspects of speech such as melody, rhythm, stress, phrasing, pauses, and voice quality. These are related to pitch (voice fundamental frequency, f0), loudness (intensity), duration (timing), and speech rate. Prosodic phenomena are ‘suprasegmental’. In other words, they typically involve units of at least on...

This chapter is directed towards therapists’ actions in group sessions involving French- and Finnish-speaking preadolescent boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). On the one hand, the focus is on how two therapists orient the group towards achieving meaningful learning outcomes with regard to the topic of conversation. The analysis concentrates...

Résumé Cette étude porte sur l’intonation des énoncés interrogatifs dans la parole des apprenants finnophones du français. Le corpus consiste en des enregistrements où 15 apprenants finnophones du français et un groupe de contrôle de 5 locuteurs natifs du français lisent un extrait d’un dialogue tiré de la pièce de théâtre En attendant Godot (Becke...

This paper analyses disfluencies and ungrammatical expressions in the speech of 11-13-year-old Finnish-speaking boys with ASD (N = 5) and with neurotypical development (N = 6). The ASD data were from authentic group therapy sessions and neurotypical data from teacher-led group discussions. The proportion of disfluencies and ungrammatical expression...

Autismikirjon häiriö on aivojen neurobiologinen kehityshäiriö, jota luonnehtivat mm. sosiaalisen vuorovaikutuksen ongelmat, aistiyliherkkyydet sekä rajoittuneet kiinnostuksen kohteet (APA, 2013). Autismikirjon henkilöillä puheen prosodiaanliittyy usein epätyypillisiä piirteitä. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan autismikirjonpoikien puheen lausumanlo...

Autismikirjon häiriö on aivojen neurobiologinen kehityshäiriö, jota luonnehtivat mm. sosiaalisen vuorovaikutuksen ongelmat, aistiyliherkkyydet sekä rajoittuneet kiinnostuksen kohteet (APA, 2013). Autismikirjon henkilöillä puheen prosodiaanliittyy usein epätyypillisiä piirteitä. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan autismikirjonpoikien puheen lausumanlo...

The focus in this article is on how two therapists orient a group of four French-speaking boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) towards achieving meaningful learning outcomes with regard to the topic of conversation. The analysis concentrates on the therapists’ output or response strategies when they orient the group discussion and assess speech...

Given the extensive body of research in audio description – the verbal-vocal description of visual or audiovisual content for visually impaired audiences – it is striking how little attention has been paid thus far to the spoken dimension of audio description and its para-linguistic, prosodic aspects. This article complements the previous research...

It is known that persons afflicted with autism often have deviant prosodic features in their speech. For example, they may have a limited range of intonation, their speech can be overly fast, jerky or loud, or it can be characterized by large pitch excursions, quiet voice, inconsistent pause structure, prominent word stress and/or by creaky or nasa...

This study describes the role of ungrammatical utterances and disfluent speech in the creation of comprehension problems between the participants in group therapy sessions of preadolescents with autism. The speech of the autistic preadolescents included frequent disfluencies and morpho-syntactic problems, such as wrong case endings, ambiguous prono...

Cet article porte sur les initiateurs de réparation non spécifiées (open class repair initiators) dans un entretien d’asile (durée 2 : 22 : 15) interprété par téléphone en Finlande entre le finnois, la langue de l’enquêteur, et le français, la langue du demandeur d’asile. Une initiation de réparation non spécifiée indique que l’ensemble d’un tour d...

In certain languages and in certain types of data, prosodic features are used to group prosodic units called by some scholars spoken sentences into larger units, often called speech paragraphs. The onsets of the first spoken sentences of these units are marked by a raised pitch level compared to the beginning of the preceding spoken sentence. The p...

Ymmärrysongelmat ja vuorovaikutustaitojen opettaminen lievästi autististen varhaisnuorten kuntoutuskeskusteluissa Autismiin liittyy monenlaisia sosiaalisen vuorovaikutuksen ongelmia. Tämän artikkelin lähtökohtana ovat aiemmassa tutkimuksessa tehdyt havainnot siitä, kuinka sosiaalisen vuorovaikutuksen vaikeudet näkyvät kuntoutuskeskusteluissa, joiss...

Using eye-movement analysis, the article examines the reading process of speech-to-text interpretation involving dynamic text emerging letter by letter on the screen. The article focuses on regressions of gaze as well as on their relationship to linguistic factors in order to reveal how the reader's gaze behaviour reflects the reading process of dy...

This paper focusses on repair sequences occurring in institutional interaction with autistic preadolescents. More precisely, the paper discusses the role of prosodic and non-verbal features in situations where the participants of interaction have difficulties understanding each other. The discussion will include analysis of the prosodic and non-ver...

Dans cet article, nous présenterons les résultats d’un test de perception où 28 informateurs finnophones ayant un niveau avancé en français ont entendu les cinq premières pages de L’étranger d’Albert Camus. Leur tâche a consisté à ajouter tous les points et les virgules au texte écrit correspondant sur la base des indices prosodiques. Les résultats...

Speakers use intonation in order to group spoken sentences together into larger units. One such grouping is often referred to as "paragraph intonation." One of its principal characteristics is that the beginning of a new speech paragraph is marked with a high pitch level at the beginning of the first spoken sentence. This phenomenon is called "pitc...

Print interpreting is a form of communication that allows deaf and hard of hearing people to get access to speech. We carried out an eye tracking experiment where twenty participants read print interpreted text presented dynamically on a computer screen. We compared regression landing points on reread words between two dynamic text presentation for...

Cette étude portera sur la traduction des phrases sans verbe fini dans les versions finnoises des Mains sales (1948) et de Huis clos (1947) de Jean-Paul Sartre. La construction sans verbe fini est très fréquente dans les pièces de théâtre où le texte consiste principalement en des dialogues. Normalement, c’est surtout le verbe de la phrase qui sert...

This article examines the role of French prosody in indicating a subordinate relationship between the clauses in L'étranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus (1942) [1998]. More precisely, this article presents different prosodic realizations of the commas that occur between subordinate clauses and main clauses. The objective of the study is to determ...

This paper examines one aspect of turn-taking organization in institutional interactions: the use of first names and their prosodic marking for next-speaker selection. Institutional interaction is characterized by asymmetrical rights to talk and pre-allocation of action. This involves the restriction of one party to asking questions and the other t...

La subordination sera abordée ici d'un point de vue permettant à la fois la comparaison de l'écrit avec I'oral, ainsi que la mise en parallèle de la production et de la perception d'un texte sonore. Plus précisément, l'étude portera sur les traits prosodiques apparaissant d la frontière syntaxique d'une proposition subordonnée circonstancielle et d...

Kirjoitetussa kielessä virkkeitä yhdistetään tekstikappaleiksi typografisin keinoin. Puheessa lausumia ryhmitellään intonaation avulla nk. ’puhekappaleiksi’. Jaksottelun perusperiaate on, että uusi puhekappale alkaa korkealta säveltasolta, ja saman kappaleen seuraavat lausumat alkavat ensimmäistä lausumaa matalammalta säveltasolta. Kun laskeva kaar...

Asperger syndrome (AS) is a form of high-functioning autism characterized by qualitative impairment in social interaction. People afflicted with AS typically have abnormal nonverbal behaviors which are often manifested by avoiding eye contact. Gaze constitutes an important interactional resource, and an AS person's tendency to avoid eye contact may...

At first sight, the intonation systems of French and Finnish – which are typologically distant languages – seem completely different. This paper aims, however, at showing that the discourse-structuring role of the utterance-final pitch rises in spontaneous spoken Finnish is in many respects reminiscent of the final pitch rises that constitute an es...

Cette thèse porte sur la contextualisation du discours radiophonique par des moyens prosodiques. Plus précisément, le travail est focalisé sur sept « figures marquées » consistant en des variations saillantes d’un ou de plusieurs paramètres prosodiques. Ces phénomènes sont envisagés ici aussi bien du point de vue de leurs formes acoustiques que du...

D’une manière générale, les fonctions des points de suspension sur les tchats semblent donc être liées à l’indication de la continuité et à la fragmentation du tour. Ces fonctions dites principales se chevauchent cependant souvent avec différents emplois interactionnels et stylistiques. En effet, lorsque les points de suspension s’associent aux ter...

Cet article porte sur le rôle d'un contour intonatif montant – descendant dans la structuration et dans la contextualisation du discours radiophonique. En raison de la forme acoustique caractéristique du phénomène étudié, nous avons choisi de l'appeler la figure HB ('H' pour 'haut' et 'B' pour 'bas'). Le corpus étudié consiste en des émissions radi...

RésuméThe article focuses on three different prosodic schemas which consist of a systematic repetition of several acoustic parameters and constitute complex phenomena both from the prosodic point of view and on the discursive plane. The functions of these figures are mostly examined with the prospect of the contextualisation of speech : in this per...

Résumé : Cet article porte sur la contextualisation de la parole par des moyens prosodiques. Deux phénomènes différents – que j'ai choisi d'appeler la « prosodie soulignante » et la « prosodie zéro » – sont abordés aussi bien sur le plan de leurs formes acoustiques que du point de vue de leurs fonctions discursives relatives à la construction du ca...