Event Abstract

Back to Event

Scalar implicatures in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder:
A ternary judgment tasks reveals differences in pragmatic tolerance

Walter Schaeken1*, Marie Van Haeren1 and Valentina Bambini2
  • 1 KU Leuven, Brain and Cognition, Belgium
  • 2 Institute for Advanced Study (IUSS), Center for Neurocognition, Epistemology and theoretical Syntax (NEtS), Italy

Introduction: Successful communication does not require only understanding the words used by the other. These words need to be integrated with the prior discourse and knowledge, and also with the environmental context and one’s understanding of the speaker’s beliefs and intentions. People with ASD show difficulties with these latter pragmatic processes. Indeed, pragmatic language impairments are important for the clinical diagnosis of ASD. These pragmatic impairments of people with ASD seem to be universal (Volden, 2017). López and Leekam (2003) demonstrated that people with ASD show difficulties in understanding ambiguous meaning; Emerich et al. (2003) evidenced difficulties in humor; and also the understanding idioms, metaphor, and irony is impaired (see e.g., Dennis et al., 2001; Happé, 1993; Kalandadze et al., 2016; Martin and Mcdonald, 2004; Saban-Bezalel et al., 2017). In the present study, we aim to gain more insight on the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures (SIs). SIs are among the most studied types of pragmatic inferences (see e.g., Guasti et al., 2005; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou and Musolino, 2003), but, to the best of our knowledge, have not yet been studied in children with ASD. Therefore, this study investigates the understanding of underinformative sentences like ‘The elephant pushes some trucks’. The scalar term ‘some’ can be interpreted pragmatically, ‘The elephant pushed not all trucks’, or logically, ‘The elephant pushed some and possibly all trucks’. Chevallier et al. (2010) and Pijnacker et al. (2009) showed that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures. As controls, they often interpret them pragmatically. This observation stands in clear in contrast with well-documented difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains (see above). This study therefore aimed a) to gain insight on the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures, and b) to do this by assessing not only sensitivity to underinformativeness, but also different degrees of tolerance to violations of informativeness. Experiment 1: In a classic statement-evaluation task, we presented the children with optimal, logical false, and underinformative utterances, on a computer screen. These utterances were embedded in child-friendly stories. The procedure (and one story) is illustrated in Figure 1. The children were asked to express their judgment, by choosing between the binary option ‘I agree’ vs. ‘I disagree’. Sixty-six 10-year-old children were tested in total. They were divided into three groups: 22 children with ASD, an IQ-matched group and an age-matched group. Results (see Table 1) showed that there are no significant differences between the ASD group and the other two groups, although there was – on the underinformative items – a trend for the children with ASD to be even more pragmatic (i.e., choosing ‘I disagree’) than the two other groups (see Pijnacker et al., 2009, who observed that adults with Asperger were even better at deriving scalar implicatures than controls). Our results are in agreement with previous studies in TD children, where, in a binary judgment, children are ‘more logical than adults’ (Noveck, 2001) and refrain to reject an underinfomative statement. Our results are also in agreement with the literature on adults with ASD, indicating no group differences with control groups (see e.g., Chevallier et al., 2010). Experiment 2: We built further on Experiment 1, using the finding of Katsos and Bishop (2011). They presented next to ‘I agree’ and ‘I disagree’ a middle option, that is, ‘I agree a bit’. As a consequence, children tend to prefer it to the extremes. This can be interpreted as evidence for sensitivity to informativeness but also tolerance to its violation. Therefore, in Experiment 2, we added a ternary middle answer option ‘I agree a bit’. This was the only difference with Experiment 1. For the rest participants and procedure were similar. In this ternary judgment task, we observed that the three groups differed significantly (see Table 2). Most importantly, the ASD group gave more ‘I totally disagree’ and fewer ‘I agree a bit’ answers for the underinformative items than the age-matched group. Interestingly, we also observed that children in the IQ-matched group performed similarly to the ASD group on the underinformative items. Hence, as in the study of Katsos and Bishop (2011) TD children clearly opted for the middle option ‘I agree a bit’ for underinformative items, whereas the children in the ASD- and the IQ-matched group split their answers more between the two extreme options. Discussion: The pragmatic profile of ASD is sketched as a pervasive difficulty in social communication, surfacing in a large range of contexts and evident at all developmental stages, even in highly verbal adults with ASD (Groen et al., 2008). An exception to this pattern is their performance on underinformative scalar utterances (Chevallier et al., 2010; Pijnacker et al., 2009). On these items, people with ASD performed similar to controls. Our data, using a more fine-grained analysis, put the previous findings in perspective. Indeed, in a standard binary task, no differences seem to be visible. However, a more fine-grained ternary task suggests that the pragmatic challenges might extend to the domain of informativeness and scalar implicatures: Children with ASD show also difficulties in handling their sensitivity to informativeness. Importantly, given the absence of clear differences between the ASD and the IQ-matched groups in the ternary task, a careful analysis of the role of global intellectual abilities in pragmatic tasks is needed.

Figure 1
Image
Figure 2
Image

References

Chevallier, C., Wilson, D., Happé, F., and Noveck, I. (2010). Scalar inferences in Autism Spectrum Disorders. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 40, 1104–1117. doi:10.1007/s10803-010-0960-8.
Dennis, M., Lazenby, A. L., and Lockyer, L. (2001). Inferential language in high-function children with autism. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 31, 47–54. doi:10.1023/A:1005661613288.
Emerich, D. M., Creaghead, N. A., Grether, S. M., Murray, D., and Grasha, C. (2003). The comprehension of humorous materials by adolescents with high-functioning autism and Asperger’s syndrome. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 33, 253–257. doi:10.1023/A:1024498232284.
Groen, W. B., Zwiers, M. P., van der Gaag, R. J., and Buitelaar, J. K. (2008). The phenotype and neural correlates of language in autism: An integrative review. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 32, 1416–1425. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2008.05.008.
Guasti, M. T., Chierchia, G., Crain, S., Foppolo, F., Gualmini, A., and Meroni, L. (2005). Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Lang. Cogn. Process. 20, 667–696. doi:10.1080/01690960444000250.
Happé, F. G. E. (1993). Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism: A test of relevance theory. Cognition 48, 101–119. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(93)90026-R.
Kalandadze, T., Norbury, C., Naerland, T., and Naess, K.-A. B. (2016). Figurative language comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: A meta-analytic review. Autism. doi:10.1177/1362361316668652.
Katsos, N., and Bishop, D. V. M. (2011). Pragmatic tolerance: Implications for the acquisition of informativeness and implicature. Cognition 120, 67–81. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.02.015.
López, B., and Leekam, S. R. (2003). Do children with autism fail to process information in context? J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry. 44, 285–300. doi:10.1111/1469-7610.00121.
Martin, I., and Mcdonald, S. (2004). An exploration of causes of non-literal language problems in individuals with Asperger syndrome. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 34, 311–328. doi:10.1023/B:JADD.0000029553.52889.15.
Noveck, I. A. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition 78, 165–88. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(00)00114-1.
Papafragou, A., and Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86, 253–82. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00179-8
Pijnacker, J., Hagoort, P., Buitelaar, J., Teunisse, J.-P., and Geurts, B. (2009). Pragmatic inferences in high-functioning adults with autism and Asperger syndrome. J. Autism Dev. Disord. 39, 607–18. doi:10.1007/s10803-008-0661-8.
Saban-Bezalel, R., Hess, S., Dolfin, D., Hermesh, H., Vishne, T., and Mashal, N. (2017). Hemispheric processing of idioms in schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder. J. Cogn. Psychol. 29, 809–820. doi:10.1080/20445911.2017.1325893.
Volden, J. (2017). “Autism Spectrum Disorder,” in Research in Clinical Pragmatics, ed. L. Cummings (Cham: Springer), 59–83.

Keywords: pragmatics, Experimental pragmatics, Autism Spectrum Disorder, scalar implicature, informativeness, Pragmatic tolerance

Conference: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.

Presentation Type: Poster or Oral

Topic: Experimental Pragmatics

Citation: Schaeken W, Van Haeren M and Bambini V (2018). Scalar implicatures in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder:
A ternary judgment tasks reveals differences in pragmatic tolerance. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00036

Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.

The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.

Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.

For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.

Received: 11 May 2018; Published Online: 14 Dec 2018.

* Correspondence: Prof. Walter Schaeken, KU Leuven, Brain and Cognition, Leuven, 3000, Belgium, walter.schaeken@ppw.kuleuven.be