Judging meaning: A domain-level difference between autistic and non-autistic adults

Abstract

We tested whether autistic adults would show selective difficulties across several tests of inferencing and social understanding in the context of average-range core language ability. One-hundred and ninety-one participants completed an online battery, and data were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis. Results showed that vocabulary knowledge was separate from other measures, which collectively formed a ‘receptive communication' factor. Autistic people underperformed on the ‘receptive communication' factor but showed more advanced vocabulary knowledge than non-autistic participants. Lower performance among autistic adults on the test battery predicted face-to-face communication difficulties measured by self-report and researcher ratings, with moderate effect sizes. Follow-up analysis indicated three further findings. We hypothesized that differences would arise from an isolated ‘theory of mind' difficulty in autistic people, but instead the data suggested more general information-processing differences when making judgements about communicative stimuli. Second, substantial group differences on a test of implied meaning were only partly explained at the factor level, suggesting that multiple cognitive influences underpinned these differences. Finally, autistic women tended to perform better than autistic men. Our results support the idea of a subtle domain-level difference in pragmatics in autistic people, while questioning the basis of this difference and highlighting substantial variability in skills across groups.

Do animated triangles reveal a marked difficulty among autistic people with reading minds?

“…In later research, an objective multiple-choice version of the task was found to be 'as sensitive as the traditional subjective method in demonstrating the wellestablished mentalizing impairment in autism' (White et al, 2011, p. 152) and this version has since been developed as a 'fast and straight forward measure of ToM [theory of mind] in autistic and neurotypical adults, to be used in future research and clinical settings' . However, recent work sounds a cautionary note about the sensitivity of the Frith--Happé Animations, as a large sample of autistic adults scored lower, but only slightly, on both mentalising and control animations compared to non-autistic adults (Wilson & Bishop, 2020). This is more consistent with a subtle domain-general difficulty in inferring meaning rather than a marked, but isolated, difficulty with mentalising.…”

Registered report: investigating a preference for certainty in conversation among autistic adults compared to dyslexic adults and the general population

“…Outliers will be defined according to the method of Hoaglin & Iglewicz (1987): more than 2.2 times the interquartile range below the first quartile. In previous work, these criteria led to exclusion of approximately 5% of participants, and captured individuals scoring below approximately 50% on the GDT and 70% on the positive control items of the original version of the ICT (Wilson & Bishop, 2020a).…”

“…Participants select which of five written words is synonymous with a target word, under a 12 s time limit. The original version of the GDT and this task showed a moderate correlation in both autistic and non-autistic samples, suggesting they are overlapping measures of core language ability ( Wilson & Bishop, 2019 , 2020a ).…”

Comparing Early Pragmatics in Typically Developing Children and Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders

“…Subsequent studies should focus on the interactions between the two domains and compare how the reciprocal relationships are manifested in children with or without neurodevelopmental disorders. Using CFA, it is feasible to evaluate the domain-level differences across groups and variabilities within groups (Wilson & Bishop, 2020 , 2021 ). An additional benefit of assessing structural language skills is that their language age can also be estimated so that the obstacle of recruiting chronologically age-matched participants with ASD can also be circumvented.…”