Autistic Twitter Replies: CMC Acts and Communicative Functions

Research on prosocial behaviour in autism increasingly considers online means of connecting through social networking sites (SNS). Mostly driven by clinical psychology, this research has been focused on psychosocial outcomes and therefore failed to consider how autistic users take up, adapt, and appropriate interactional functions of particular social media platforms. The present article addresses this gap by drawing on advances in interactional linguistics in two otherwise distinct fields ­– computer-mediated discourse analysis and autistic communication – to explore in depth, for the first time, the complexities of applying existing speech act taxonomies to tweets by autistic users. We propose an innovative combination of the CMC act taxonomy with an interactional perspective which, methodologically, advances research on speech acts on SNS while also allowing identification of communicative purposes in autistic users’ SNS posts. Building on our earlier study showing the prevalence of replies in autistic adults’ Twitter use, we combine a quantitative analysis of speech acts across 256 replies with a qualitative examination of interactional functions. Our findings demonstrate the importance of moving away from deficit-based approaches to autistic communication and show how linguistic approaches to computer-mediated discourse can help understand the different ways in which autistic people adapt SNS resources for social purposes.