Interview with Professor RITA JORDAN (extract)

From Volume 4 Number 1

ADAM FEINSTEIN: One of the big questions today is when specific biomedical markers may be discovered for autism. How close so you think we are?

Professor RITA JORDAN: I think that, in some respects, we are a long way off, but there may be some conditions that could be realised within the next five years. Nevertheless, whenever you are doing research into an individual - whether on a psychological, biological or behavioural level - you are taking snapshots in time. And just because you find an abnormality or a difference in one of those snapshots, it may not tell you exactly what is underneath that. The danger is we may be too excited about promoting a particular discovery and we go down wrong routes prematurely. The science must be of good quality.

AF: What about the possibility of psycho-linguistic markers?

RJ: We have always known that it is very rare to have "pure" autism. We are beginning to see where some linkages with other conditions might be. There are certainly parallels with some forms of language disorder. Some forms of the autistic spectrum, may form more naturally with that group. We need to do research in that area. But often labels are being used with very similar or very different conditions. There is some interesting work looking at the way some knowledge gained through the linguistic route can be directed towards overcoming some of the difficulties on autism. For example, some people with Asperger's syndrome with good structural language skills have been shown to develop their ability to "mentalise" - to understand mental states and real-world events - through their knowledge of language. For instance, the very use of the word "that" triggers the knowledge that we are not talking about something real but "as if." More research is definitely needed on autism and language. Part of the difficulty is that we are asking for retrospective accounts. Parents will often report that a child was using language perfectly normally, but the more one looks into it, there are difficulties. What tends to develop is what is known as "right-hemisphere" language: the child can name things, can have echolalic language (repeating whole set phrases from television or a computer game). Children with autism tend - in contrast to what we claim about other aspects of their cognitive development - to come from a broad brushstroke. They remember chunks of language, as a whole, and then break it up into patterns. I don't know of any systemic approach that starts with chunks of words and breaks them down - it might by a useful method ...

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Interview with Professor RITA JORDAN (extract)

Looking Up, 16-page English PDF Edition, Back Issues and Current Issue

HOW TO CONTACT US

Search our autism pages

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