comparing ad-hoc and scalar implicatures in children with autism spectrum disorder
Greta Mazzaggio (Author), Francesca Foppolo (Author), Remo Job (Author), Luca Surian (Author)

Abstract

Pragmatic abilities of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been the subject of extensive research, often considering their communicative problems as derived from their deficit in Theory of Mind (ToM). On the other hand, recent studies on the derivation of scalar implicatures (SIs)– such as some but not all that are built on certain lexical items ordered in an entailment scale based on their informativeness, e.g. "some, all" − found no differences between typical population and people with ASD. With our work we find out that TD group’s performance was significantly better in the ad-hoc condition than the ASD’s, and both groups’ performance was related to Age. With respect to the SIs condition, the TD group’s performance was numerically better than the ASD group, but the difference was not significant, which may be due to a lack of power. Moreover, there is again a positive relationship between Age and SI performance, but only for the TD group. For the ASD group, there are positive relationships between SI performance and ToM as well as the linguistic syntactic measure. These relationships suggest that there is something different underlying the two groups’ performance in the SI condition. In computing SIs, ASD children seem to rely mainly on their syntactic linguistic abilities, which in turn are strongly connected with ToM skills; this connection can be related with the syntactic complexity of ToM’s clauses that involve subordination e.g. You believe that I believe that you believe. On the other hand, given that the best predictor for ad-hoc implicatures computation in ASD children is Age, we may suggest that indeed there is a delay in the development of pragmatic abilities in ASD children, also confirmed by the lower ToM scores in the ASD group. In conclusion, it seems that the computation of SIs and ad-hoc implicatures rests on different computational mechanisms and future research should take this insight into consideration.

Keywords

theory of mind;scalar implicatures;ad-hoc implicatures;autism spectrum disorder;

Data

Language: English
Year of publishing:
Typology: 1.12 - Published Scientific Conference Contribution Abstract
Organization: UNG - University of Nova Gorica
UDC: 81'27
COBISS: 77090051 Link will open in a new window
Views: 1195
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Other data

URN: URN:SI:UNG
Pages: [1] str.
DOI: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2017.71.00007
ID: 13373791
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