Kissine, Mikhail;
Cano-Chervel, Julie;
Carlier, Sophie;
De Brabanter, Philippe;
Ducenne, Lesley;
Pairon, Marie-Charlotte;
Deconinck, Nicolas;
... Leybaert, Jacqueline; + view all
(2015)
Children with Autism Understand Indirect Speech Acts: Evidence from a Semi-Structured Act-Out Task.
PLoS ONE
, 10
(11)
, Article e0142191. 10.1371/journal.pone.0142191.
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Abstract
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are often said to present a global pragmatic impairment. However, there is some observational evidence that context-based comprehension of indirect requests may be preserved in autism. In order to provide experimental confirmation to this hypothesis, indirect speech act comprehension was tested in a group of 15 children with autism between 7 and 12 years and a group of 20 typically developing children between 2:7 and 3:6 years. The aim of the study was to determine whether children with autism can display genuinely contextual understanding of indirect requests. The experiment consisted of a three-pronged semi-structured task involving Mr Potato Head. In the first phase a declarative sentence was uttered by one adult as an instruction to put a garment on a Mr Potato Head toy; in the second the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by another speaker; in the third phase the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by the first speaker. Children with autism complied with the indirect request in the first phase and demonstrated the capacity to inhibit the directive interpretation in phases 2 and 3. TD children had some difficulty in understanding the indirect instruction in phase 1. These results call for a more nuanced view of pragmatic dysfunction in autism.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Children with Autism Understand Indirect Speech Acts: Evidence from a Semi-Structured Act-Out Task |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0142191 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0142191 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright: © 2015 Kissine et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | Science & Technology, Multidisciplinary Sciences, Science & Technology - Other Topics, FALSE BELIEF, PRAGMATIC IMPAIRMENTS, ACTION ANTICIPATION, INDIRECT REQUESTS, MIND, LANGUAGE, ADULTS, COMPREHENSION, ATTRIBUTION, EXPLORATION |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10214686 |
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