Pragmatic Inferences in High-Functioning Adults with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Abstract

Although people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have severe problems with pragmatic aspects of language, little is known about their pragmatic reasoning. We carried out a behavioral study on highfunctioning adults with autistic disorder (n = 11) and Asperger syndrome (n = 17) and matched controls (n = 28) to investigate whether they are capable of deriving scalar implicatures, which are generally considered to be pragmatic inferences. Participants were presented with underinformative sentences like ''Some sparrows are birds''. This sentence is logically true, but pragmatically inappropriate if the scalar implicature ''Not all sparrows are birds'' is derived. The present findings indicate that the combined ASD group was just as likely as controls to derive scalar implicatures, yet there was a difference between participants with autistic disorder and Asperger syndrome, suggesting a potential differentiation between these disorders in pragmatic reasoning. Moreover, our results suggest that verbal intelligence is a constraint for task performance in autistic disorder but not in Asperger syndrome.

Referring expressions and structural language abilities in children with specific language impairment: A pragmatic tolerance account

“…Norbury, 2005a, b). In line with this suggestion, an increasing number of studies have highlighted that individuals with ASD and age appropriate language scores perform comparably to age-matched TD peers on pragmatic tasks (Norbury, 2005a,b;Pijnacker et al, 2009;Chevallier et al, 2010). Comparing rates of over-and under-informative utterances in different clinical groups will yield novel insights into the underlying skills that support communicative competence.…”

Scalar Inferences in Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…The aim of this paper is to test this prediction. This also provides a follow-up to a study (undertaken independently of ours) which was published as we were writing this paper (Pijnacker et al Geurts 2009). In that study, adult participants were presented with a range of written sentences containing the scalar terms ''some'' (e.g., ''Some birds are sparrows'') or ''or'' (e.g., ''Snakes have paws or wings'') and were asked to judge whether these were true or false (True in the first case; False in the second).…”

Can Asperger syndrome be distinguished from autism? An anatomic likelihood meta-analysis of MRI studies

“…Asperger syndrome and autism present with distinct verbal styles, [18][19][20] motor signs, 21 emotion perception 22 and pragmatic reasoning. 23 There are critical differences in processing strategies adopted by individuals with Asperger syndrome and those with autism. The former prefer to use visuospatial rather than the linguistic approaches adopted by the latter group.…”