L'Interazione tra genitore e bambino con disturbo dello spettro autistico: analisi delle funzioni comunicative.

This study analyzes the interaction between parent and child with Autism Spectrum Disorder, examining the communicative style of the adult by use of five functions: Tutoring, Didactic, Conversational, Control and Asynchronous. These functions are expression of a different degree of parental responsiveness in terms of ability to adapt to the child’s development level. Nine adult-child dyads participated in the study. The children, affected with ASD (8 M / 1 F), had a chronological age of 52 months, a developmental age of 22 months and IQ of 44. Each adult-child dyad was videotaped during a 15 minute play-session. The results show that the communicative interaction between an adult and a child with ASD is characterized by a diversified use of the five functions examined. Although each parent uses the Tutoring, Didactic and Conversational functions in different ways, the Control function is the most commonly used. Finally, the Asynchronous function turns out to be exceptionally unfrequent, showing on the one hand, the ability of the adult not to act in a dysfunctional way, on the other, possibly denoting a kind of distancing from the child. The individual profiles emerged from the study may be useful for the delineation of therapeutic intervention based on the adult-child interaction.