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Embodying gestures: The Social Orienting Model and the study of early gestures in autism

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Abstract

Autistic spectrum disorders impair the ability to interact socially. Detecting and understanding their onset is not only an empirical enterprise, but also a theoretical one, often linked to studies on intersubjectivity. Different theoretical perspectives have been elaborated in the past to account for the deficit. The main purpose of this paper is to reinforce and offer empirical grounding to a recent approach, termed Social Orienting Model, by presenting the main theoretical approaches to autism and contrasting them to this view, as well as considering its possible effect on empirical research, focusing on current literature analyzing gestures in children with autism.

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Notes

  1. This list does not in any way wish to cover all the available theoretical literature on autism, but rather to point out the main lines of current research. Readers interested in a historical review the concept of autism and its relation to other deficits may find one in Wing 2005.

  2. A similar line of reasoning may be held for the Central Coherence approach and the Emotional approach, which have been linked to one or the other of the theories described above.

  3. To this point Goffman has observed that participants in a social interaction accord different weights to each other’s behavior and that individuals are able to parse out what he terms an ‘attentional track’, i.e. within social communication there are always certain acts that are treated as being relevant vs. others that are judged as being incidental (Goffman 1974). Kendon states that the way in which behavior is parsed and relevance of meaning is ascribed to actions is consistent among individuals and that while the number of gestures may vary their quality displays many similarities (Kendon 2005).

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    Laura Sparaci

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Sparaci, L. Embodying gestures: The Social Orienting Model and the study of early gestures in autism. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 203–223 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9084-9

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