An important aspect of daily life is the ability to infer information about the contents of other people's minds, such as what they can see and what they know, in order to engage in successful interactions. This is referred to as possession of a “Theory of Mind” (ToM). Past research has shown that adults with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) often show deficits in social communication abilities, although can successfully pass tests of explicit ToM. The current study utilized a computerized false‐belief task to explore subtle differences (i.e., measuring response times and accuracy rates) in how efficiently ToM capacities—specifically, belief‐attribution—are utilized in adults with and without ASD. In the task, participants were asked to attribute a belief‐state to either themselves or another person, following establishment of a true or false‐belief scenario. Results revealed comparable patterns of ToM engagement across individuals with and without ASD, with faster and more accurate responses to “Self” versus “Other” oriented questions, and slower response times when shifting between the “Self” and “Other” perspective compared to when maintaining a perspective. However, autistic individuals showed a particular deficit in correctly identifying a belief‐state in false‐belief trials, in which two contrasting belief‐states had to be held in mind, suggesting more difficulty disengaging from current, reality based belief‐states than neuro‐typical individuals. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1542–1553. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary To successfully communicate, we have to think about what other people do/do not know; this is called having a “Theory of Mind.” This study looked at how well people use their Theory of Mind when thinking about the contents of people's minds. Results showed that people with autism had difficulties considering more than one mental state at a time, suggesting they may have more trouble in stopping themselves thinking about what is happening in reality than people without autism.

In this commentary, we emphasize the importance of the observations presented by Kissine (2021) in his target article for our understanding of the nonmonolithic nature of pragmatics. Our first aim is to complement Kissine's argument, discussing some critical cases of linguistic processes that demonstrate the need for a finer-grained characterization of pragmatic phenomena. In addition, we report some findings that suggest that perspective taking may emerge as atypical even in autistic individuals who appear to be able to pass the standard theory-of-mind tasks. Our second aim is thus to argue that, albeit difficult to spot in experimental settings, the atypical theory-of-mind profile of low-and high-functioning autistic individuals is mirrored in their difficulties in everyday sociocommunicative interactions. Moreover, we claim that subtle differences in perspective-taking abilities may explain the highly heterogeneous linguistic profile of autistic individuals. Ultimately, with this commentary we wish to highlight the need for an increased appreciation of the role of perspective taking in typical and atypical language acquisition. This is crucial to our understanding of the nature of language acquisition, and can shed more light on the interaction between language and other aspects of human cognition.

Spatial prepositions express relations between objects in space. A subset of spatial prepositions is ambiguous due to the different perspectives from which these spatial relations can be considered. The ability to consider another person's perspective is still developing in children. This study investigates how Dutch-speaking children (mean age 10;1) and adults interpret perspective-dependent spatial prepositions uttered by a speaker. We found that adults took the speaker's perspective in a third of the cases, whereas children did so in a sixth of the cases. No differences in interpretation emerged between prepositions in assertions and requests, although these different speech acts reflect different speaker intentions. In general, children performed like adults, but less often took the speaker's perspective with naast compared to voor and achter in assertions. We conclude that 10-year-olds can take another person's perspective when interpreting spatial prepositions, but, like adults, only do so in a minority of cases.

Linguistic cues can encourage adults to adopt an other-centric rather than an egocentric perspective. This study investigated whether the presence of direct speech compared to indirect speech influences listeners’ choice of perspective when interpreting the Dutch spatial prepositions voor ‘in front of’ and achter ‘behind’. Dutch adults and 10 to 12-year-old children were tested in a sentence-picture verification task. Contrary to expectations, we found no difference between direct and indirect speech (Study 1), nor did we find a difference between reported and non-reported speech (Study 2). Most adult listeners adopted the contrasting perspective of the speaker, irrespective of how the information about the reported speech was expressed. We did find a difference between adults and children: children adopted the other person’s perspective less often than adults did. Overall, the results suggest that the mere presence of a reported speaker already is a cue for taking this speaker’s perspective.