From Jon Brock’s Cracking the Enigma research blog, an unpacking of the phenomenon of reversed pronouns in children with and without autism. 

“You made a circle”, exclaimed Ethan, looking up from his drawing.

“You did make a circle”, his mum acknowledged, ignoring the fact that, not for the first time, Ethan had reversed the pronoun, saying “you” when he should have said “I”. 

Ethan was one of six children from Providence, Rhode Island taking part in a study of child language development. Every couple of weeks, a researcher from Brown University would visit him and his mum at home, record, and then transcribe their conversations in painstaking detail. The transcriptions would show that Ethan was a prolific reverser of pronouns; frequently saying “you” when he meant “I” and “your” instead of “my” or “mine”. This curious habit began as soon as pronouns entered his vocabulary and he was still reversing pronouns when, just before his third birthday, the study came to an end.

Ethan’s language skills were otherwise exceptionally good. When assessed at 18 months, his scores put him in the top 1% for children his age. However, some years after the study finished, it transpired that Ethan had Asperger syndrome.

(…) 

Say it again

Kanner’s explanation for pronoun reversal in autism came from another observation - that children with autism often repeat entire phrases verbatim, inappropriately and out of context. This so-called ‘echolalia’ would lead to reversals as the pronouns are repeated exactly as heard. British child psychiatrist, Michael Rutter gave the example of a hungry child requesting a biscuit by echoing the phrase “Do you want a biscuit?” The pronoun was reversed but the biscuit was obtained.

Consistent with this explanation, Evans and Demuth noted that Ethan was indeed most likely to reverse pronouns when imitating an utterance that somebody else had previously made. “Dad gave me that ring”, for example, was clearly a reversal but was almost certainly something his mum had said previously.

Case closed one might think.

However, even using the most generous criteria, imitations accounted for less than half of Ethan’s recorded reversals. What’s more, in contrast to the child in Rutter’s example, he actually made relatively few reversals during requests. For example, when asking for his bottle, he said “I want bottle”, using “I” correctly (even though the sentence wasn’t fully formed).

An alternative perspective

Further analyses revealed two final clues. First, as well as using “you” to refer to himself, Ethan occasionally used “I” to refer to other people (something Naima very rarely did). Second, reversed pronouns were more likely to occur in sentences that contained multiple pronouns. For example, at aged 22 months, Ethan was recorded saying “I got you out” when he should have said “You got me out”.

 These observations suggest that his problem lay, not in understanding the principles of which pronoun to use, but in applying those principles during a conversation. His difficulties were pragmatic rather than conceptual. More precisely, Evans and Demuth propose that Ethan’s pronoun reversal reflected difficulty in referential perspective taking - in choosing the right word given who was being referred to at any given moment in the conversation.

This account of Ethan’s pronoun reversal fits nicely with research suggesting that autistic children have difficulty with other linguistic terms that depend on the speaker’s perspective.

In an intriguing study published last year, Peter Hobson and colleagues at University College London (Hobson et al. 2010) found that children with autism were competent at using “here” and “there” to refer to locations near or far from themselves. However, the same children struggled to follow similar instructions given by two other people – a task that required them to consider the speaker’s perspective to work out which locations “here” and “there” referred to.

(…) 

Wrapping up

Ethan’s pronoun reversal is particularly intriguing in the light of his Asperger syndrome diagnosis. However, it would be unwise to assume that he is representative of all individuals on the autism spectrum. His difficulties do not seem to be explicable in terms of either a lack of relevant linguistic experience or a tendency to echo phrases verbatim, but these may still be contributory factors, and could well explain pronoun reversal in other autistic individuals. Indeed, as noted earlier, Ethan’s error patterns are quite different to some other examples in the autism literature.

Perhaps then the reason pronoun reversal is so common in autism is that there are multiple factors associated with autism that each contribute to difficulties producing and understanding pronouns. Working out why autistic children reverse pronouns may involve looking at the evidence on a case-by-case basis.

I find this research incredibly fascinating, since it’s such a ubiquitous part of communicating with children with autism and, so often, represents a primary concern (and cause of frustration) for their parents. In my anecdotal experience, even the most diligent of corrective measures typically fails to produce lasting change. Instead, the child often begins to self-correct, quite spontaneously, and this seems to coincide with the point in development in which they begin to develop a differentiated sense of self, specifically, a sense of agency and ability to act and impact on the world. 

It’s well worth clicking through to read the post in it’s entirety, do so here.