What Autism Can Reveal About Every ... not Sentences

Abstract

The sentence Every horse did not jump over the fence can be interpreted with the negation taking scope over the quantifier (i.e. not every horse jumped) or with the quantifier Every taking scope over the negation (ultimately providing the reading no horse jumped). Beginning with Musolino, Crain and Thornton (2000), much work has shown that while adults typically adopt a Not every reading in '2-of-3' contexts (e.g. where 2-of-3 horses jump over a fence), children do not and often produce None readings instead. In line with suggestions from Lidz (2003, 2006), we propose that this developmental effect relies to a great extent on pragmatic capacities. In the present work, we aim to replicate Musolino et al.'s (2000) results with 4-year-olds and adults while including verbally competent autistic participants. Syntactic skills among verbally competent autistic participants are assumed to be unimpaired while their pragmatic deficiencies have been well documented. Our results show an adult preference for the Not every reading in 2-of-3 contexts and equivocality among children and autistic participants. This is in line with the expectation that syntax makes the two readings equally available and that adults, unlike young children and autistic participants, are efficient at exploiting the context in order to come up with a single consistent reading.

The Role of Executive Function and Theory of Mind in Pragmatic Computations

“…It is worth noting that scalar implicature computation (and other pragmatic abilities—see Loukusa & Moilanen, 2009 for a review) has been investigated in adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a group that includes individuals with widely different cognitive and linguistic profiles who are generally known to have ToM deficits (Newschaffer et al, 2007). 2 In one study, ASD participants (who scored poorly on ToM measures of false belief) adopted pragmatically under‐informative descriptions of story‐book content more often than neurotypical controls, as anticipated by the hypothesis that ToM is involved in scalar implicature computation (Noveck, Guelminger, Georgieff, & Labruyere, 2007). Other studies have shown that ASD adolescents (Hochstein, Bale, & Barner, 2017; Pijnacker, Hagoort, Buitelaar, Teunisse, & Geurts, 2009) and adults (Chevallier, Wilson, Happé, & Noveck, 2010) are not impaired in their ability to compute implicatures.…”

Quantification in Child Language

“…Consider the ambiguous sentences below along with their potential paraphrases. Several studies on the acquisition of quantification have shown that when given a Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT), preschoolers, unlike adults, display a strong preference for the isomorphic interpretation of sentences like (19-20) (Musolino (1998), Musolino et al (2000), Lidz and Musolino (2002), Musolino and Gualmini (2004), Noveck et al (2007), among others). This is what Musolino (1998) called "the observation of isomorphism".…”

“…Isomorphism effects have been found in several languages (Lidz & Musolino 2002, Noveck et al 2007, Han, Lidz & Musolino 2007 1 . Lidz and Musolino (2002) examined sentences containing a quantifier and negation in Kannada in order to determine whether isomorphism should be described in structural or linear terms.…”

Sound Reasoning (Literally): Prospects and Challenges of Current Acoustic Logics

“…Closer to home, might some children with cognitive disabilities come to this world expecting auditory, olfactory, or tactile modes of reasoning (cf. [11])? The ability to draw inferences may be an important marker of rationality, but ascribing a lack of such logical powers to an agent [5] will remain inconclusive as long as we have not essayed multiple kinds of logic.…”