A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of socio-cultural values in Chinese and English social stories for autistic individuals

Abstract

Social Stories are utilised to educate autistic individuals about appropriate social behaviours and politeness in social contexts. Based on the Theory of Mind (ToM), Social Stories are associated with neurotypicality which suggests human brains function in a similar way. Employing corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the study examines and compares the cultural differences between Chinese Social Stories (CSS) and English Social Stories (ESS) through analysing keywords, frequency of lexical items and collocation of the first-person pronoun. The results reveal that CSS emphasise the Confucian values of politeness, filial piety and hierarchical human relationship, while ESS recognise individual preferences, emotions and the value of fairness. The results enrich the knowledge of the discoursal and rhetorical features of Social Stories in different languages and provide theoretical implications for understanding the concepts of normality, politeness and neurotypicality. This article concludes by arguing that society should adopt the neurodiversity approach towards autistic individuals.