A. Taylor Newton, et. al., Univ. of Denver, Univ. of Oregon
Summary
This is an interesting comparison study on word usage of bloggers with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to show that ASD might be due to social contexts and vanish in ‘computer-mediated’ communications.
Details
A set of syndromes collectively referred to as ASD is marked by deficits in responding promptly to socio-emotional cues such as smiling back or maintaining eye contact. Authors have tried to find out how people with ASD fare in socially distal contexts in their communication skills. By taking Internet blogging as such an example, authors found 57 blogs from self-proclaimed ASDs and compared their word usage (using LIWC dictionaries) on a five-factor structure used previously in a study on blog linguistics of neuro-typical (NT) bloggers. Based on their results, they found that ASD word usage did not differ by more than 14% of a SD although there was 4 times as much variance in ‘Sociability’ factor.
Review
This study seems to validate what many in autistic community have claimed that Internet provides them a medium to ‘speak for themselves’. While loopholes can be pointed out in the sample size, uniform representation and increased variance in ‘Sociability’ words, to be fair to authors, they do mention performing an invasive research and comparing distal and proximal studies in future.
Disclaimer
The work discussed above is an original work presented at CHI 2009 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.
So many kids with autism (and many adults as well) have such a hard time communicating with other normal people. Seeing that the internet definitely helped them feel more comfortable because they have time to think more about their responses, etc, was very interesting, and great that they had a way to communicate without being frustrated.
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