The Conversation Frame

We explore how fictive interaction (Pascual 2002, 2014), manifested as echolalia (i.e. prior speech repeated verbatim), is successfully used by autistic children as a compensatory strategy in conversation. We video-recorded four Brazilian autistic children between the ages of 4 and 12 in interactions with adults in weekly therapy sessions. We found that these autistic children do not use direct speech to represent prior speech only, as in ordinary reported speech. Instead, they use direct speech