Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are often said to present a global pragmatic impairment. However, there is some observational evidence that context-based comprehension of indirect requests may be preserved in autism. In order to provide experimental confirmation to this hypothesis, indirect speech act comprehension was tested in a group of 15 children with autism between 7 and 12 years and a group of 20 typically developing children between 2:7 and 3:6 years. The aim of the study was to determine whether children with autism can display genuinely contextual understanding of indirect requests. The experiment consisted of a three-pronged semi-structured task involving Mr Potato Head. In the first phase a declarative sentence was uttered by one adult as an instruction to put a garment on a Mr Potato Head toy; in the second the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by another speaker; in the third phase the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by the first speaker. Children with autism complied with the indirect request in the first phase and demonstrated the capacity to inhibit the directive interpretation in phases 2 and 3. TD children had some difficulty in understanding the indirect instruction in phase 1. These results call for a more nuanced view of pragmatic dysfunction in autism.

This study assesses the extent to which children with autism understand requests performed with grammatically non-imperative sentence types. Ten children with autism were videotaped in naturalistic conditions. Four grammatical sentence types were distinguished: imperative, declarative, interrogative and sub-sentential. For each category, the proportion of requests complied with significantly exceeded the proportion of requests not complied with, and no difference across categories was found. These results show that children with autism do not rely exclusively on the linguistic form to interpret an utterance as a request.

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Armand Colin. © Armand Colin. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

This volume brings together thoroughly reworked versions of a selection of papers presented at the conference The Notion of Commitment in Linguistics, held at the University of Antwerp in January 2007. It is the companion volume to a collection of essays in French to be published in Langue Française and devoted to La notion de prise en charge. Commitment is a close counterpart toprise en charge, and two contributors, Celle and Lansari, use it essentially as a translation of the French term. However, commitment and its verbal cognates (to commit NP to and to be committed to) do not cover the exact same range of meanings as prise en charge. For a thorough assessment of the French term, we refer readers to the introduction to the Langue Française volume. In the present article, we focus entirely on commitment. The term is widely used in at least three major areas of linguistic enquiry:1 studies on illocutionary acts, studies on modality and evidentiality, and the formal modelling of dialogue/argumentation. In spite of its frequent use, the notion has rarely been theorised and has never been the subject of a monograph or a specialised reader. In keeping with this is the fact that none of the many dictionaries and encyclopaedias of linguistics or philosophy that we have consulted devotes a separate entry to it. Section 1 of this introduction briefly reviews what commitment means in the three fields just mentioned. Now and then, with respect to a particular issue, pointers are given to which articles in this collection have something to say about the issue. In section 2, we take a lexical and syntactic look at the ways in which the contributors to the present volume use the term. In section 3, we outline each of the contributions, with a focus on the role that commitment plays in them.