2030V - Beyond Neurotypical and Monolingual Norms: A Conversation Analytic Approach to Social Communication Assessment

This presentation will provide an overview of conversation analysis (CA), a method originating from the field of ethnomethodology, and explain how it offers a theoretically-grounded means of analyzing the intersectional experiences of autistic, multilingual children’s everyday social interactions. We will present a case illustration to demonstrate the contributions of CA for: (a) shifting the approach from treating social communication as an individual skill to understanding it as an interactional achievement, and (b) surfacing social communicative competencies that may be missed or dismissed by assessment methods anchored in neurotypical and monolingual standards. We discuss the implications of outcomes for raising questions about the validity of some deeply entrenched notions of what constitutes language and social communicative competence in speech-language pathology.