Abstract
An earlier analysis of an autistic adolescent's repeated retellings of a story (Levy & Fowler, 2004–2005) showed how a transition from disorganized linguistic behavior to organized narratives was scaffolded by adult speech. The present article is concerned with the role of kinesthetic enactment in this same transition. The goal of the analysis is to trace the emergence of narrative coherence relative to changes in speech-movement combinations. The analysis yields the following pattern of change: from utterances (1) elicited in the third-person and produced with diffuse body motion, then (2) reproduced while enacted, sometimes in the first-person, (3) elicited without enactment in the third-person, and (4) reproduced in the third-person without specific adult prompts and in the absence of full-body enactment. This pattern is interpreted as a process of increasing explicitation (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986a); relying at first on the grounding of speech-movement combinations in physical space, and later in linguistically created origos (Buhler, 1982). The findings support McNeill's (2005) view of language as a multimodal process that relies on two semiotic modes, the conventional lexicogrammatical categories of speech, and the imagistic and idiosyncratic properties of body motion.
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