Selective Pragmatic Impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Indirect Requests Versus Irony

Comprehension of Spatial Demonstratives in Mandarin-speaking Children on the Autism Spectrum: The Roles of Theory of Mind and Executive Function

The present study aimed to examine whether Mandarin-speaking children on the autism spectrum showed differences in comprehending spatial demonstratives ("this" and "that", and "here" and "there"), as compared to typically developing (TD) children. Another aim of this study was to investigate the roles of theory of mind (ToM) and executive functions (EF) in the comprehension of spatial demonstratives. Twenty-seven autistic children (mean age 6.86) and 27 receptive-vocabulary-matched TD children (mean age 5.82) were recruited. Demonstrative comprehension was assessed based on participants' ability to place objects in certain locations according to experimenters' instructions which involved these demonstratives in three different conditions (same-, opposite-, and spectator-perspective conditions). Four false-belief tasks were administered to measure ToM, and the word-span task and the dimensional change card sort task were used to measure two subcomponents of EF - working memory and mental flexibility - respectively. Children on the autism spectrum were found to score below TD children in the comprehension of spatial demonstratives. In addition, the results showed that ToM and working memory were conducive to the correct interpretation of spatial demonstratives. The two cognitive abilities mutually influenced their respective roles in spatial demonstrative comprehension in the three different conditions. The findings suggest that the comprehension of spatial demonstratives comprehension is an area of need in Mandarin-speaking children on the autism spectrum, and it might be linked to their differences in cognitive abilities.

Does ChatGPT have a typical or atypical theory of mind?

In recent years, the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, to imitate human behavioral patterns have been attracting growing interest from experimental psychology. Although ChatGPT can successfully generate accurate theoretical and inferential information in several fields, its ability to exhibit a Theory of Mind (ToM) is a topic of debate and interest in literature. Impairments in ToM are considered responsible for social difficulties in many clinical conditions, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Some studies showed that ChatGPT can successfully pass classical ToM tasks, however, the response style used by LLMs to solve advanced ToM tasks, comparing their abilities with those of typical development (TD) individuals and clinical populations, has not been explored. In this preliminary study, we administered the Advanced ToM Test and the Emotion Attribution Task to ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT-4 and compared their responses with those of an ASD and TD group. Our results showed that the two LLMs had higher accuracy in understanding mental states, although ChatGPT-3.5 failed with more complex mental states. In understanding emotional states, ChatGPT-3.5 performed significantly worse than TDs but did not differ from ASDs, showing difficulty with negative emotions. ChatGPT-4 achieved higher accuracy, but difficulties with recognizing sadness and anger persisted. The style adopted by both LLMs appeared verbose, and repetitive, tending to violate Grice's maxims. This conversational style seems similar to that adopted by high-functioning ASDs. Clinical implications and potential applications are discussed.

Preserved Spontaneous Mentalizing Amid Reduced Intersubject Variability in Autism During a Movie Narrative

BACKGROUND

While individuals with autism often face challenges in everyday social interactions, they may demonstrate proficiency in structured theory of mind (ToM) tasks that assess their ability to infer others' mental states. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and pupillometry, we investigated whether these discrepancies stem from diminished spontaneous mentalizing or broader difficulties in unstructured contexts.

METHODS

Fifty-two adults diagnosed with autism and 52 neurotypical control participants viewed the animated short Partly Cloudy, a nonverbal animated film with a dynamic social narrative known to engage the ToM brain network during specific scenes. Analysis focused on comparing brain and pupil responses to these ToM events. Additionally, dynamic intersubject correlations were used to explore the variability of these responses throughout the film.

RESULTS

Both groups showed similar brain and pupil responses to ToM events and provided comparable descriptions of the characters' mental states. However, participants with autism exhibited significantly stronger correlations in their responses across the film's social narrative, indicating reduced interindividual variability. This distinct pattern emerged well before any ToM events and involved brain regions beyond the ToM network.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings provide functional evidence of spontaneous mentalizing in autism, demonstrating this capacity in a context that affords but does not require mentalizing. Rather than responses to ToM events, a novel neurocognitive signature-interindividual variability in brain and pupil responses to evolving social narratives-differentiated neurotypical individuals from individuals with autism. These results suggest that idiosyncratic narrative processing in unstructured settings, a common element of everyday social interactions, may offer a more sensitive scenario for understanding the autistic mind.

Autistic and non-autistic adults use discourse context to determine a speaker's intention to request

The current study focuses on how autistic adults utilize context to determine whether ambiguous utterances (e.g., "I'm thirsty") are intended as indirect requests or as literal comment/questions. Two questions are addressed: (1) How do autistic adults compare to neurotypical adults in using context to interpret an utterance's intention as either literal or a request? (2) What cognitive mechanisms correlate with indirect request interpretation, and are these different for participants in each group? Twenty-six autistic and 26 neurotypical college students participated, engaging in an online experiment where they read narratives that ended with utterances open to literal or request interpretations, based on context. After each narrative, participants selected the best paraphrase of the utterance from two options, literal versus request. Following this task, participants completed two mentalizing measures (a false belief and emotion-identification task) and several executive functioning tests. The best model for predicting paraphrase choice included scores on the emotion-identification task and context as main effects, along with the interaction between both. Participants with higher emotion-identification test scores were more likely to provide correct paraphrases. Models including group as a main effect and/or interaction were not better at fitting the data, nor were any models that included executive functioning measures as main effects or interactions. Emotion-identification test scores, but not autism diagnosis, predict how adults infer whether an utterance is a request. Findings suggest that autistic adults use context similarly to neurotypical adults when interpreting requests, and that similar processes underlie performance for each group.

Challenges with computing scalar and ad-hoc implicatures in Mandarin-speaking 4-8-year-old autistic children

INTRODUCTION

Mixed findings have been reported about the computation of scalar or/and ad-hoc implicatures in primarily school-age autistic verbal children and adolescents: while some studies reported their struggles with both implicatures, others observed their strengths in computing scalar implicatures. This study extends the previous investigation by testing the derivation of scalar (including both number and quantifier) and ad-hoc implicatures of a younger group of Mandarin-speaking autistic 4-8-year-olds; moreover, we assess the biological, linguistic, and cognitive factors affecting children's implicature acquisition.

METHODS

The participants included 22 4-8-year-old autistic verbal children (mean age = 67.64 months) and 19 typically developing (TD) children who did not significantly differ in age, receptive vocabulary, and non-verbal IQ. Both groups completed a computer-based Truth Value Judgment task, assessing their knowledge of scalar (involving the number 'three' and the quantifier 'some') and ad-hoc implicatures. We also examined whether their implicature computation was linked to age, receptive vocabulary, non-verbal IQ, and Theory of Mind (ToM).

RESULTS

Compared with the TD controls, autistic children derived significantly fewer scalar and ad-hoc implicatures. Specifically, TD children successfully computed number and ad-hoc implicatures, contrasting to the bimodal distribution of their pragmatic vs. logical responses to quantifier implicatures. Though autistic children performed better with number implicatures slightly above the chance level, they had difficulties in computing quantifier and ad-hoc implicatures. Further, autistic children's knowledge of the number and ad-hoc implicatures was linked to their ToM skills.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings underscore the overall delayed implicature knowledge of young autistic children, and their low sensitivity to the implicatures is related to the core ToM deficits. Furthermore, our data confirm the coherent pattern of the earlier acquisition of number over quantifier implicatures and illuminate the distinct mechanisms underlying the computation of scalar vs. ad-hoc implicatures.

Figurative language processing in autism spectrum disorders: A review

Impairments in the broader domain of pragmatics are considered to be a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A challenging aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to process nonliteral language. Interestingly, previous studies in figurative language comprehension in ASD have demonstrated conflicting results regarding participants' performance. The main scientific debate focuses on the underlying skills which facilitate processing of nonliteral speech in ASD. Namely, Theory of Mind (ToM), language abilities and Executive functions (EFs) are regarded as factors affecting autistic individuals' performance. This review addresses figurative language comprehension in ASD in light of the above three interpretive accounts. We reviewed data from recent studies in this field concluding that autistic children indeed encounter systematic difficulties in the processing of non-literal language. Moreover, only ToM and verbal skills were found to correlate the most with figurative language comprehension in ASD. Notably, we found that differences related to research methodology and tasks' properties may have led to discrepancies between studies' results. Finally, we argue that future studies should encompass in their experimental design figurative comprehension tasks with minimal linguistic demands and also measures of ToM, verbal ability and EFs in order to shed more light in the independent contribution of those skills to the processing of nonliteral language in ASD.

Humor in autism spectrum disorders: A systematic review

OBJECTIVES

Humor is essential to social relationships. Its use and understanding appear to be impaired in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The main objective was to review the existing literature on the detection, understanding and use of humor in persons with ASD. The secondary objective involved exploring assessment scales and specific intervention tools.

METHODS

A systematic review of the literature was carried out on all available French and English scientific papers about humor - including irony - in persons with ASD up to November 2021. We extracted 552 references and included 43 articles from six databases.

RESULTS

Studies suggest that those with ASD can detect audiovisual and written humor. Understanding humor was impaired in writing and when using pure auditory stimuli and non-verbal cartoons. For irony, the results indicated a lower detection of quality and less understanding in speaking but not in writing. Regarding its use, in terms of expression, people with ASD use benevolent humor less often and do not consider humor as a key source of satisfaction with life, as opposed to the control group.

CONCLUSIONS

It appears that it would be worthwhile to develop standardized humor detection and assessment tools specific to persons with ASD. Practical strategies that focus on humor ability could be worth developing, either individually or in groups.

Comprehension of irony in autistic children: The role of theory of mind and executive function

Although previous studies have examined irony comprehension in autistic children and potential impact factors, the relationship between theory of mind (ToM), executive function (EF), symptoms of autism, and comprehension of irony in this population remains largely unknown. This study explored irony comprehension in autistic children and examined the roles of ToM and EF in linking autism symptoms to deficits in irony comprehension. Twenty autistic children were compared with 25 typically developing (TD) children in an irony story picture task, ToM task, and EF task. The results showed that autistic children had impaired comprehension of irony compared with TD children, and performance on ironic stories showed a significant moderate discriminatory effect in predicting autistic children. A ToM deficit has also been proposed for autistic children. Comprehension of irony was significantly correlated with second-order ToM (2nd ToM) but was not significantly correlated with any components of EF. Moreover, 2nd ToM can predict the level of irony comprehension and mediate the relationship between symptoms of autism and irony comprehension. Taken together, these findings suggest that irony comprehension may offer a potential cognitive marker for quantifying syndrome manifestations in autistic children, and 2nd ToM may provide insight into the theoretical mechanism underlying the deficit in irony comprehension in this population.

Sexual Knowledge, Experiences, and Pragmatic Language in Adults With and Without Autism: Implications for Sex Education

Autistic adults have similar levels of desire for sexual and romantic relationships as their non-autistic peers. However, autistic adults are less likely to be in relationships and have less dating experience. We compared sexual knowledge, experiences, and pragmatic language ability in a community sample of young adults with (n = 27, mean age = 22.11) and without autism (n = 122, mean age = 19.47). Receipt of sex education and sexual knowledge did not differ between groups. However, autistic adults had significantly fewer partnered experiences and impaired pragmatic language. Within both groups, pragmatic skill predicted accurate sexual knowledge above and beyond general communication abilities. Findings suggest that sex education for autistic adults must address the social communication component of healthy romantic and sexual relationships.

Comprehension of indirect answers: Developmental trajectory for preschool- and early elementary school-aged children with typical development

Indirect answers are a common type of non-literal language that do not provide an explicit "yes" or "no" to a question (e.g., "I have to work late" indirectly answered "Are you going to the party?" with a negative response). In the current study, we examined the developmental trajectory of comprehension of indirect answers among 5- to 10-year-old children with typical development. Forty-eight children, 23 boys and 25 girls, between the ages of 5 years; 0 months and 10 years; 11 months (M = 8;2, SD = 19.77 months) completed an experimental task to judge whether a verbally presented indirect answer meant yes or no (Comprehension Task) and then explain their choice (Explanation Task). Responses were scored for accuracy and coded for error analysis. On the Comprehension Task, the 5- to 8-year-olds performed with approximately 85% accuracy, while the 9- and 10-year-olds achieved 95% accuracy. On the Explanation Task, the cross-sectional trajectory revealed three stages: the 5- and 6-year-olds adequately explained indirect answers 32% of the time, the 7- and 8-year-olds performed significantly higher at 55%, and the 9- and 10-year-olds made significant gains than the younger children at 66%. Error analysis revealed that when children fail to interpret speaker intentions appropriately, they repeat the speaker's utterance or provide an insufficient explanation 80% of the time. Other responses, such as those irrelevant to the context, indicating "I don't know" or no response, or that were made-up interpretations each accounted for 2%-10% of total inadequate explanations. Study findings indicate discrepancies between task performances and offer two separate sets of baseline data for future comparisons that investigate comprehension or explanation of indirect answers by children with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and by those with varying cognitive and language profiles.

Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

Non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills in autistic young adults, young adults with autistic traits and control young adults: Group differences and interrelatedness of skills

BACKGROUND

Despite increasing knowledge of social communication skills of autistic peole, the interrelatedness of different skills such as non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills is not much known about. A better understanding of the complex interplay between different domains of social communication helps us to develop assessment protocols for individuals with social communication difficulties.

AIMS

To compare the performances of autistic young adults, young adults with autistic traits identified in childhood and control young adults in social communication tasks measuring non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills. In addition, to examine associations between the different social communication measures.

METHODS & PROCEDURES

Autistic young adults (n = 34), young adults with autistic traits (n = 19) and control young adults (n = 36) completed the extra- and paralinguistic scales of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), the Faux Pas Recognition Test, Social-Pragmatic Questions (SoPra) and the Empathy Quotient (EQ).

OUTCOMES & RESULTS

Group differences were found in the performance in the ABaCo, SoPra and EQ scores. Compared with the control young adults, autistic young adults scored lower. The performance of the young adults in the autistic traits group fell in between the other two groups. There were no group differences in the Faux Pas Recognition Test. The variability within the groups was large in all measurements. In the control group, there was a significant correlation between EQ and SoPra scores and between the Faux Pas and SoPra scores. In the autistic group, a significant correlation was found between Faux Pas and SoPra scores. Also, other patterns were observed but these were not statistically significant.

CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS

The young adults with autistic traits fell in between the control and autistic young adults, highlighting the presence of the continuum in the terms of features of social communication. The results support other current research that suggests that theory of mind and other social communication skills may not be universally or widely impaired in all autistic individuals without cognitive deficits. Although all tasks examined social communication skills, only a small number of significant correlations were found between test scores. This highlights that clinical conclusions about a person's social communication should be based on the outcomes of different types of methods measuring different aspects of social communication. It is clear that the interrelatedness of different social communication skills needs further research.

WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS

What is already known on this subject For successful communication, the ability to infer others' emotions, intentions and mental states is crucial. Autistic people have difficulty with many aspects of social communication. However, the associations between different aspects of social communication need to be better understood. What this paper adds to existing knowledge The unique contribution of this study is to compare the performance of autistic people not only with that of a control group but also with people with childhood autistic traits. This provides an understanding of the interrelatedness of different social communication skills in people with varying degrees of autistic traits. This study used four assessment methods focusing on three different social communication elements (non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills). These elements have complex relationships to one another, some being closely overlapping, some more distally related and some reflect more complex multifactorial elements. This study shows that although groups differ from each other in most of the assessments, the performance of different groups overlapped showing that many autistic young adults can perform well in non-linguistic and social inference tasks in structured assessment contexts. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Our findings suggest that in the assessment of social communication, self-reports and clinical assessments can be used effectively together. They can complement each other, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of a person, leading to more personalized therapeutic interventions.

Linguistic signs in action: The neuropragmatics of speech acts

What makes human communication exceptional is the ability to grasp speaker's intentions beyond what is said verbally. How the brain processes communicative functions is one of the central concerns of the neurobiology of language and pragmatics. Linguistic-pragmatic theories define these functions as speech acts, and various pragmatic traits characterise them at the levels of propositional content, action sequence structure, related commitments and social aspects. Here I discuss recent neurocognitive studies, which have shown that the use of identical linguistic signs in conveying different communicative functions elicits distinct and ultra-rapid neural responses. Interestingly, cortical areas show differential involvement underlying various pragmatic features related to theory-of-mind, emotion and action for specific speech acts expressed with the same utterances. Drawing on a neurocognitive model, I posit that understanding speech acts involves the expectation of typical partner follow-up actions and that this predictive knowledge is immediately reflected in mind and brain.

Autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits differ from non-autistic adults in social-pragmatic inferencing and narrative discourse

Since prior research has mostly focused on children, less is known about how autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits interpret pragmatically complex social situations and the kind of narrative discourse they produce. 32 autistic young adults, 18 young adults with sub-clinical autistic traits and 34 non-autistic young adults participated this study. They were shown videos of social interactions which required complex pragmatic processing and were asked to freely narrate what they thought was occurring in each video. Their narratives were coded for aspects of social-pragmatic and narrative discourse. The results indicate that the autistic and sub-clinical groups differed from the comparison group in what they inferred as relevant video content. The narratives of the autistic group also differed from the comparison group in meaning, focus and emphasis on details. In addition, the comparison group produced more holistic narratives whereas the autistic and sub-clinical groups produced more atomistic narratives. Correlational findings indicated that perceptual reasoning has stronger associations with pragmatic inferencing in the autistic and sub-clinical groups than in the comparison group. This study suggests that autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits differ from non-autistic adults in what they perceive to be relevant in their social world.

Lay Abstract

Previous social-pragmatic and narrative research involving autistic individuals has mostly focused on children. Little is known about how autistic adults and adults who have autistic traits but do not have a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) interpret complex social situations and tell narratives about these situations. We asked 32 autistic young adults, 18 adults with autistic traits but no ASD diagnosis, and 34 non-autistic young adults to watch socially complex situations and freely tell narratives about what they thought was occurring in each situation. These narratives were analysed for how the participants had interpreted the situations and for the type of narratives they produced. We found that the groups had both similarities and differences. Regarding the differences, we found that the autistic adults and adults with autistic traits interpreted the situations differently from the non-autistic adults. The autistic adults found different aspects of the situations relevant, had different foci and placed greater importance on details than the non-autistic adults. The autistic adults and adults with autistic traits also differed from the non-autistic adults by having more detail- and event-focused narratives whereas the non-autistic adults were more likely to base their narratives on their own broad interpretations of the situations. Perceptual processing styles appeared to play a bigger role in interpreting the situations for the autistic adults and adults with autistic traits than the non-autistic adults. Our findings suggest that autistic adults and adults with autistic traits focus on different aspects in their social world than non-autistic adults.

Children with autism spectrum disorder show atypical electroencephalographic response to processing contextual incongruencies

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with social communication, making it challenging to interpret contextual information that aids in accurately interpreting language. To investigate how the brain processes the contextual information and how this is different in ASD, we compared event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to processing visual and auditory congruent and incongruent information. Two groups of children participated in the study: 37 typically developing children and 15 children with ASD (age range = 6 to 12). We applied a language task involving auditory sentences describing congruent or incongruent images. We investigated two ERP components associated with language processing: the N400 and P600. Our results showed how children with ASD present significant differences in their neural responses in comparison with the TD group, even when their reaction times and correct trials are not significantly different from the TD group.

How do children overcome their pragmatic performance problems in the true belief task? The role of advanced pragmatics and higher-order theory of mind

The true belief (TB) control condition of the classical location-change task asks children to ascribe a veridical belief to an agent to predict her action (analog to the false belief (FB) condition to test Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities). Studies that administered TB tasks to a broad age range of children yielded surprising findings of a U-shaped performance curve in this seemingly trivial task. Children before age four perform competently in the TB condition. Children who begin to solve the FB condition at age four, however, fail the TB condition and only from around age 10, children succeed again. New evidence suggests that the decline in performance around age four reflects pragmatic confusions caused by the triviality of the task rather than real competence deficits in ToM. Based on these results, it can be hypothesized that the recovery of performance at the end of the U-shaped curve reflects underlying developments in children's growing pragmatic awareness. The aim of the current set of studies, therefore, was to test whether the developmental change at the end of the U-shaped performance curve can be explained by changes in children's pragmatic understanding and by more general underlying developmental changes in recursive ToM or recursive thinking in general. Results from Study 1 (N = 81, 6-10 years) suggest that children's recursive ToM, but not their advanced pragmatic understanding or general recursive thinking abilities predict their TB performance. However, this relationship could not be replicated in Study 2 (N = 87, 6-10 years) and Study 3 (N = 64, 6-10 years) in which neither recursive ToM nor advanced pragmatic understanding or recursive thinking explained children's performance in the TB task. The studies therefore remain inconclusive regarding explanations for the end of the U-shaped performance curve. Future research needs to investigate potential pragmatic and general cognitive foundations of this developmental change more thoroughly.

Dialogic Priming and Dynamic Resonance in Autism: Creativity Competing with Engagement in Chinese Children with ASD

A growing body of research has focused on the relationship between priming and engagement through dialogue (e.g. Tantucci and Wang in Appl Linguist 43(1):115-146, 2022; Mikulincer et al. in Cognit Emotion 25:519-531, 2011). The present study addresses this issue also in relation to creativity and provides a new applied model to measure intersubjective engagement in ASD vs neurotypical populations' speech. We compared two balanced corpora of naturalistic Mandarin interaction of typically developing children and children diagnosed with ASD (cf. Zhou and Zhang in Xueqian jiaoyu yanjiu [Stud Preschool Educ] 6:72-84, 2020). We fitted a mixed effects linear regression showing that in both neurotypical and ASD populations, dialogic priming significantly correlates with engagement and with whether the child could creatively re-use the original input to produce a new construction. What we found is that creativity and intersubjective engagement are in competition in children with ASD in contrast with the neurotypical population. This finding points to a relatively impeded ability in ASD to re-combine creatively a priming input during the here-and-now of a dialogic event.

Qualitative Differences in Attribution of Mental States to Other People in Autism and Schizophrenia: What are the Tools for Differential Diagnosis?

The differential diagnosis between schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) remains an important clinical question, because they have overlap in clinical diagnosis. This study explored the differences between ASD (n = 44) and SSD patients (n = 59), compared to typically developing peers (n = 63), in completing an advanced Theory of Mind (ToM) task. The outcome found several differences between groups. The SSD patients showed greater difficulty in understanding social scenarios, while ASD individuals understood the stories, but did not correctly identify the protagonist's intention. The interesting aspect of the results is that some ToM stories are more informative about the mentalistic reasoning of the two clinical groups, namely, the stories that investigate pretend, persuasion, double bluff and ironic joke constructs.

Understanding indirect requests for information in high-functioning autism

Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), and results are conflicting. Some studies report HFA individuals’ difficulties in indirect requests comprehension; others suggest that it might be preserved in HFA. Furthermore, the role of Theory of Mind in understanding indirect requests is an open issue. The goal of this work is twofold: first, assessing whether comprehension of indirect requests for information is preserved in HFA; second, exploring whether mind-reading skills predict this ability. We tested a group of (n = 14; 9–12 years) HFA children and two groups of younger (n = 19; 5–6 years) and older (n = 28; 9–12 years) typically developing (TD) children in a semi-structured task involving direct, indirect and highly indirect requests for information. Results suggested that HFA can understand indirect and highly indirect requests, as well as TD children. Yet, while Theory of Mind skills seem to enhance older TD children understanding, this is not the case for HFA children. Therefore, interestingly, they could rely on different interpretative strategies.

Social-Pragmatic Inferencing, Visual Social Attention and Physiological Reactivity to Complex Social Scenes in Autistic Young Adults

This study examined social-pragmatic inferencing, visual social attention and physiological reactivity to complex social scenes. Participants were autistic young adults (n = 14) and a control group of young adults (n = 14) without intellectual disability. Results indicate between-group differences in social-pragmatic inferencing, moment-level social attention and heart rate variability (HRV) reactivity. A key finding suggests associations between increased moment-level social attention to facial emotion expressions, better social-pragmatic inferencing and greater HRV suppression in autistic young adults. Supporting previous research, better social-pragmatic inferencing was found associated with less autistic traits.

Understanding communicative intentions in schizophrenia using an error analysis approach

Patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) have a core impairment in the communicative-pragmatic domain, characterized by severe difficulties in correctly inferring the speaker's communicative intentions. While several studies have investigated pragmatic performance of patients with SCZ, little research has analyzed the errors committed in the comprehension of different communicative acts. The present research investigated error patterns in 24 patients with SCZ and 24 healthy controls (HC) during a task assessing the comprehension of different communicative acts, i.e., sincere, deceitful and ironic, and their relationship with the clinical features of SCZ. We used signal detection analysis to quantify participants' ability to correctly detect the speakers' communicative intention, i.e., sensitivity, and their tendency to wrongly perceive a communicative intention when not present, i.e., response bias. Further, we investigated the relationship between sensitivity and response bias, and the clinical features of the disorder, namely symptom severity, pharmacotherapy, and personal and social functioning. The results showed that the ability to infer the speaker's communicative intention is impaired in SCZ, as patients exhibited lower sensitivity, compared to HC, for all the pragmatic phenomena evaluated, i.e., sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. Further, we found that the sensitivity measure for irony was related to disorganized/concrete symptoms. Moreover, patients with SCZ showed a stronger response bias for deceitful communicative acts compared to HC: when committing errors, they tended to misattribute deceitful intentions more often than sincere and ironic ones. This tendency to misattribute deceitful communicative intentions may be related to the attributional bias characterizing the disorder.

Phonetic Inflexibility in Autistic Adults

This study examined whether the atypical speech style that is frequently reported in autistic adults is underpinned by an inflexible production of phonetic targets. In a first task, 20 male autistic adults and 20 neuro-typicals had to read and produce native vowels. To assess the extent to which phonetic inflexibility is due to an overall fine-grained control of phonetic behavior or to a lack of flexibility in the realization of one's phonological repertoire, the second task asked participants to reproduce artificial vowel-like sounds. Results confirmed the presence of a greater articulatory stability in the production of native vowels in autistic adults. When instructed to imitate artificial vowel-like sounds, the autistic group did not better approximate the targets' acoustic properties relative to neuro-typicals but their performance at reproducing artificial vowels was less variable and influenced to a greater extent by the articulatory properties of their own vocalic space. These findings suggest that the greater articulatory stability observed in autistic adults arises from a lack of flexibility in the production of their own native vowels. The two phonetic tasks are devoid of any pragmatic constraint, which indicates that phonetic inflexibility in autism is partly independent of register selection. LAY SUMMARY: Autistic and neuro-typical adults took part in two tasks: one in which they produced vowels from French, their native tongue, and the other where they imitated unfamiliar vowels. Autistic adults displayed significantly less variation in their production of different French vowels. In imitating unfamiliar vowels, they were more influenced by the way they pronounce French vowels. These results suggest that the atypical speech style, frequently attested in autistic individuals, could stem from an unusually stable pronunciation of speech sounds.

Comprehension of the Presupposition Trigger Ye "Also" by Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorders

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been reported to be widely impaired in their understanding of linguistic expressions that rely on elements of the context or norms of communication. The accurate interpretation of sentences conveying presuppositions often relies on such content, however, little previous research has investigated the ASD population’s understanding of these sentences. The present study attempts to remedy this by exploring the understanding that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with ASD and their typically developing (TD) peers have of sentence containing the presupposition trigger ye “also”. We used a Picture Selection Task and found that Mandarin-speaking preschool children with ASD performed significantly worse than their TD peers with regard to their understanding of the presuppositional content of sentences containing this presupposition trigger. Additionally, in contrast with previous results, TD preschoolers’ understanding of this presupposition trigger was found to be adult-like. We attribute this to an improved experimental design.

Verbal and Figural Creativity in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development

Previous studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate lower performance on creativity tasks. Yet, recent findings suggest that individuals with ASD are not necessarily impaired in verbal creativity, as measured by the novel metaphor generation task. The current study investigates verbal and figural creativity in 40 children with ASD (aged 11–14 years) and 39 peers with typical development (TD) (aged 11–15 years). We also tested the contribution of executive functions to the creative performance. A sentence completion questionnaire was used to test creative verbal generation, while a task of drawing non-existent objects was used to assess figural abilities. The results indicate that children with ASD generated a greater quantity of creative metaphors and showed greater use of a specific kind of representational change on the figural creativity task: cross-category insertions (e.g., a house with a tail). However, no correlation was found between the metaphor generation task and the use of cross-category insertions for either group. Results also showed that, whereas phonemic fluency contributed to the explained variance in novel metaphor generation in the ASD group, fluid intelligence, although only marginally, contributed to variance in novel metaphor generation in the TD group. These findings suggest that verbal creativity and figural creativity are two separate abilities relying on different cognitive resources. Our results show that those with ASD and TD differ in the cognitive abilities they use to perform the metaphor generation task. The research points to a unique creative cognition profile among children with ASD.

A Distinction Between Linguistic and Social Pragmatics Helps the Precise Characterization of Pragmatic Challenges in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders and Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and children with developmental language disorder (DLD) face challenges with pragmatics, but the nature and sources of these difficulties are not fully understood yet. The purpose of this study was to compare the competence of children with ASD and children with DLD in two pragmatics tasks that place different demands on theory of mind (ToM) and structural language. Method Twenty Spanish-speaking children with ASD, 20 with DLD, and 40 age- and language-matched children with neurotypical development were assessed using two pragmatics tasks: a linguistic pragmatics task, which requires competence with structural language, and a social pragmatics task, which requires competence with ToM as well. Results For linguistic pragmatics, the ASD group performed similarly to the DLD and language-matched groups, and performance was predicted by structural language. For social pragmatics, the ASD group performed lower than the DLD and language-matched groups, and performance was predicted both by structural language and ToM. Conclusions Children with ASD and children with DLD face difficulties in linguistic pragmatics tasks, in keeping with their structural language. Children with ASD face exceptional difficulties with social pragmatics tasks, due to their difficulties with ToM. The distinction between linguistic and social pragmatic competences can inform assessment and intervention for pragmatic difficulties in different populations.

Strategic Deception in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often associated with impaired perspective-taking skills. Deception is an important indicator of perspective-taking, and therefore may be thought to pose difficulties to people with ASD (e.g., Baron-Cohen in J Child Psychol Psychiatry 3:1141–1155, 1992). To test this hypothesis, we asked participants with and without ASD to play a computerised deception game. We found that participants with ASD were equally likely—and in complex cases of deception even more likely—to deceive and detect deception, and learned deception at a faster rate. However, participants with ASD initially deceived less frequently, and were slower at detecting deception. These results suggest that people with ASD readily engage in deception but may do so through conscious and effortful reasoning about other people’s perspective.

Emotional Processing of Ironic Versus Literal Criticism in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults: Evidence From Eye-Tracking

Typically developing adults are able to keep track of story characters' emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these processes in autistic adults, since previous research has demonstrated socio-emotional difficulties among autistic people, which may lead to problems processing irony and its related emotional processes despite an intact ability to integrate language in context. We recorded eye movements from autistic and nonautistic adults while they read narratives in which a character (the victim) was either criticized in an ironic or a literal manner by another character (the protagonist). A target sentence then either described the victim as feeling hurt/amused by the comment, or the protagonist as having intended to hurt/amused the victim by making the comment. Results from the nonautistic adults broadly replicated the key findings from Filik et al., supporting the two-stage account. Importantly, the autistic adults did not show comparable two-stage processing of ironic language; they did not differentiate between the emotional responses for victims or protagonists following ironic versus literal criticism. These findings suggest that autistic people experience a specific difficulty taking into account other peoples' communicative intentions (i.e., infer their mental state) to appropriately anticipate emotional responses to an ironic comment. We discuss how these difficulties might link to atypical socio-emotional processing in autism, and the ability to maintain successful real-life social interactions. Autism Res 2020, 13: 563-578. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: In line with research showing that autistic people have difficulties considering others' mental states, we found autistic adults were impaired at distinguishing the emotions and intentions experienced by story characters who received sarcastic comments (e.g., "That was fantastic parking" in a context where someone's parking was particularly bad). These findings highlight the difficulties that autistic people experience taking into account other peoples' intentions during communication to appropriately anticipate their emotional responses. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Sleep-behaviour relationship in children with autism spectrum disorder: methodological pitfalls and insights from cognition and sensory processing

Sleep disturbances are frequent and varied in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Growing evidence suggests that sleep problems in children with ASD are driven by their clinical characteristics and psychiatric comorbidities. Therefore, the wide range of reported sleep disturbances reflects the marked heterogeneity of clinical pictures in ASD. Whether sleep disturbances and their various forms may, in turn, account for at least part of the phenotypical variability of ASD is a crucial question discussed in this review. We first outline studies both validating and challenging a bidirectional theoretical framework for sleep disorders in children with ASD. We then propose to extend this model by including cognition and sensory processing as key factors in the vicious circle linking sleep disorders and autistic symptoms. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: There is a bidirectional interplay between autism symptoms and sleep disturbances. Sleep influence on daytime cognitive and sensory skills should be further investigated.

Pragmatics and social motivation in autism

Pragmatic deficits constitute a central feature of autism, which is highly relevant to Jaswal & Akhtar's criticisms of the social motivation theory of autism. Recent research reveals that while certain context-based interpretations are accessible, more complex pragmatic phenomena remain challenging for people on the spectrum. Such a selective pragmatic impairment is difficult to account for in motivational terms.

Attenuated impression of irony created by the mismatch of verbal and nonverbal cues in patients with autism spectrum disorder

Perception of irony has been observed to be impaired in adults with autism spectrum disorder. In typically developed adults, the mismatch of verbal and nonverbal emotional cues can be perceived as an expression of irony even in the absence of any further contextual information. In this study, we evaluate to what extent high functioning autists perceive this incongruence as expressing irony. Our results show that incongruent verbal and nonverbal signals create an impression of irony significantly less often in participants with high-functioning autism than in typically developed control subjects. The extent of overall autistic symptomatology as measured with the autism-spectrum questionnaire (AQ), however, does not correlate with the reduced tendency to attribute incongruent stimuli as expressing irony. Therefore, the attenuation in irony attribution might rather be related to specific subdomains of autistic traits, such as a reduced tendency to interpret communicative signals in terms of complex intentional mental states. The observed differences in irony attribution support the assumption that a less pronounced tendency to engage in higher order mentalization processes might underlie the impairment of pragmatic language understanding in high functioning autism.