Compliance with requests by children with autism: the impact of sentence type

Abstract

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.

Children with Autism Understand Indirect Speech Acts: Evidence from a Semi-Structured Act-Out Task

“…The present paper constitutes an experimental sequel to Kissine et al [ 33 ]. In line with the results of this study, our first hypothesis is that children with autism will understand indirect requests.…”

“…Consequently, some kind of contextual processing is required to comprehend (and then to comply with) the request. What Kissine et al’s [ 33 ] results show, then, is that children with autism do not rely exclusively on the linguistic meaning. Since it is quite unlikely that children in their study engaged in sophisticated reasoning about the speaker’s communicative intentions, their compliance with non-imperative requests probably reveals some kind of egocentric pragmatic processing.…”

“…A much more categorical finding emerged from an observational study of eleven French-speaking children with low-functioning autism, filmed in a familiar setting while interacting with familiar adults by Kissine, De Brabanter and Leybaert [ 33 ]. Measuring compliance with requests, they found that all requests were complied with well above chance level.…”

“…However, in the corpus analysed by Kissine et al [ 33 ] requests usually concerned some salient action, and it is possible that children used the utterance or some of its components as a cue towards this action. Of course, such a pragmatic strategy would still amount to combining linguistic meaning and the surrounding context to reach the communicated meaning.…”

Pragmatics, Cognitive Flexibility and Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Metonymy comprehension has also been shown to be more preserved than metaphor and to be reliably predicted by receptive vocabulary (Rundblad and Annaz, 2010). 16 Finally, an observational study by Kissine et al (forthcoming) revealed that children with low‐level autism go beyond the utterance's literal meaning in order to interpret it as a request. It is plausible that none of these pragmatic processes requires taking an alternative perspective on the world, although, of course, a more elaborate argument is needed to settle this issue.…”