Abstract

Our research is aimed at exploring facilitated communicative interactions between an autistic child and his main facilitators in naturally occurring contexts. In particular, we hypothesized that: 1) child's verbal production shows some stylistic consistence, but varies according to different contexts (school vs. home; formal vs. informal texts) and different facilitators (mother and teacher); 2) child’s original and peculiar linguistic behaviour may indicate a relative linguistic independence in facilitated communication. A 7 years old child, with diagnosis of autism, participated in 28 facilitated sessions at home and at school. The whole linguistic "corpus" was examined by Sphinx Lexica Edition Program. Linguistic analyses concerned global aspects, lexical and content characteristics. Results confirm essentially the hypothesis.