Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by impairments in communication. Even children with age-appropriate syntactic and lexical abilities seem to have difficulty using language communicatively (i.e. pragmatics) 1. While pronoun production is well-studied in ASD2,3, little is known about pronoun comprehension – a well-understood pragmatic task in psycholinguistics.
Objectives:
We investigate where pragmatics breaks down in autism, and the cognitive skills associated with pragmatic tasks. We examine where pronoun comprehension is impaired in highly-verbal children with autism. To the extent that pronoun resolution depends on linguistic heuristics, we might expect it to be unimpaired in these individuals (like scalar implicature)4. To the extent that it involves social perspective-taking or inhibitory control, we might expect otherwise.
Methods:
ASD children (mean age≈7, mean syntax score >100) and controls matched on linguistic abilities heard pronouns across different environments with increasingly complex contextual contributions. Participants answered a pronoun resolution question after hearing a story like those below. As pronoun resolution got more difficult, participants had to: 1) rely only on features (e.g. understand that “he” must refer to a singular male entity), 2) keep track of parallel sentences with the pronoun either in the subject (she) or object (her) position, 3) build a discourse representation (know who’s focused) and maintain it over a longer discourse, 4) determine who’s focused in a discourse when it conflicts with recent mention, 5) use thematic-role mapping in parallel sentences – pronouns in the subject position refer to the first-mentioned character, pronouns in the object position refer to the second-mentioned, 6) use contrastive stress.
1) Emily is in the park with Jacob. She wants to go on the swings.
2) Sheila visited Marky and she/Frankie called Frankie/her.
3) Emily and Hannah are in the park. Emily is playing on the swings. [It’s a nice day outside. The sun is shining overhead.] She loves playing in the park.
4) Emily is in the park with Hannah. She wants to go on the swings.
5) Sheila visited Ellie and she/Frankie called Frankie/her.
6) Sheila visited Ellie and SHE/Frankie called Frankie/HER.
Results:
As difficulty increased, results showed: 1) both groups at ceiling, 2) both groups above chance at both pronoun positions, no significant difference between groups , 3) both groups above chance, no significant difference between groups, 4) TD children demonstrating the expected result5 (>80% first-mentioned responses),ASD children only marginally different from chance (<60% first-mentioned responses), 5) TD children choose the first-mentioned character significantly more with a subject pronoun (she) than with a object pronoun (her), ASD kids are at chance at both, 6) TD children demonstrate sensitivity to contrastive stress in the subject pronoun condition (she and SHE) but not in the object condition,ASD kids show no sensitivity to contrastive stress.
Conclusions:
Thus, several features of pronoun resolution are unimpaired in ASD. However, as integration across types of information (e.g. discourse status and recency) is required, ASD children struggle to successfully arrive at preferred interpretations. Roles for cognitive and general language abilities in these results will be discussed.
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