Multimodal envelopes of an autistic child's attentionality in the context of storytelling in early childhood education

Abstract

This article analyzes the multimodal attentional envelopes of a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) during storytelling in early childhood education. Grounded in the concepts of joint attention, sociocognitive language acquisition, and multimodality, it investigates vocalizations, gestures, gaze direction, and facial prosody. The study, which employed ethnographic and micro-ethnographic approaches, was conducted at a municipal daycare center in João Pessoa using participant observation, video recordings, and the analysis of interactional scenes. The results demonstrate the child's engagement in triadic and quaternary joint attention situations through imitation, perspective-sharing, and multimodal synchronization. The study concludes that storytelling fosters participation, inclusion, and language development.