From proto-syntax to actual syntax

Many minimally verbal, severe-to-moderately autistic individuals are able to pick up, with little to no instruction, what we might call “proto-syntax”: namely, how to put nouns, verbs, and adjectives together in an order that reflects the word order rule of their native languages—whether through speech, written words, or pictures.  For English, this means putting the subject noun before the verb and the object noun after the verb:

• I want cookie.
• Daddy push truck.

At the two-word level, proto-syntax includes the “telegraphic speech” evinced not just by language-delayed autistic individuals, but by typically developing two year olds:

• Truck red.
• Mommy come.

Some people equate this sort of basic content-word ordering with actual syntax: after all, it implicitly encodes which noun is the subject and which noun is the object. But actual syntax involves so much more than how to order subject and object nouns into simple sentences.

Actual syntax involves not just content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions) but also verb tense endings, auxiliary verbs, and function words like articles (“a” and “the”) or, in certain contexts, words like “by” or “that.”

Actual syntax involves noun phrases, not just bare nouns: phrases that include not just the noun, but, at the very least (where English is concerned), an accompanying article. It’s what allows you to refer to “the truck” (a specific truck that’s familiar to both speaker and listener) vs. “a truck” (a novel or unspecified truck).

And actual syntax allows for sentence transformations, for example passive voice, in which the subject and object nouns are switched and a specific auxiliary verb and a specific function word are inserted into specific slots in the sentence. For example, in the sentence below, “truck” now comes first, but it is still the object, not the subject, of the verb “push.”

• The truck was pushed by Daddy. [Here I’ve highlighted, in order: an article, an auxiliary verb, a tense ending, and a function word.]

Actual syntax also involves not just linear sequences, but structure, or groupings of words. Syntactic structure is what differentiates the two meanings of

• He talked about sex with Dick Cavett.

Syntactic structure what tells you that “who” is the subject of “vanish” but the object of “banish” in this pair:

• Who do you want to vanish?
• Who do you want to banish?

And syntactic structure is what tells you that “he” can refer to “John” in the first and second sentences, but not in the third:

• John keeps saying that he is smart.
• It's that he's smart that John keeps saying.
• He keeps saying that John is smart.

Besides syntactic structure, there are syntactic rules. These tell you, for example, how to map basic statements into questions:

• She is sleeping to Is she sleeping?
• She slept to Did she sleep? (NOT Slept she? or Did she slept?)
• She sleeps to Does she sleep? (NOT Sleeps she? Or Does she sleeps?)

Actual syntax, in fact, has so much going on that it takes at least two semesters of advanced linguistics courses focused specifically on syntax to really appreciate what all is involved.

That said, actual syntax is not just an arcane subject for linguists, nor a sort of icing on the linguistic cake for those who are able to sequence bare nouns and verbs into basic subject-verb-object sentences. Actual syntax is the structural backbone of language and the semantic backbone of meaningful communication. It’s what allows people to express statements that go beyond the immediate here and now to the past, future, hypothetical, and counterfactual. It’s what allows reminiscences, future planning, problem solving, and precautions (“if you run into the street without looking, you might get hit by a car”). It’s what allows you to not just answer other people’s questions (which is how so many autistic individuals spend so much of their instructional hours), but to ask questions of your own.

Indeed, so important is the ability to ask questions that two prominent autism researchers, Lynn Koegel and Robert Koegel, have specifically targeted this skill as a pivotal skill that, when explicitly instructed, helps individuals with autism improve upon their conversational initiation skills—an area of significant and widespread difficulty in autism.

For me in particular, with my linguistic connections to syntax and, more importantly, my personal and professional connections to autism, syntax is so important that I’ve devoted over a decade of my professional life to developing the only software tool that teaches the full gamut of expressive syntax skills to individuals with autism.

It’s easy to underestimate what goes into such a tool—especially given the number of apps that teach one or another tiny subset of the skills involved in forming the most basic of sentences. A software tool that teaches all of the syntactic phenomena of English, with enough exercises for instruction, practice, and generalization, requires hundreds of pages of complex linguistic processing code, and thousands of pages of lesson code, developed over years of beta-testing with individuals at multiple levels of syntactic development.

Here’s just a tiny a sample of what that translates into in practice:

https://autism-language-therapies.com/HTML5/Demo1.html