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.

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Cancelability is one of the main tests to identify conversational implicature in general, and scalar implicatures in particular. Despite this fact, cancelability itself is a phenomenon rarely looked at. This paper presents an account of when the cancellation of a scalar implicature is an acceptable discourse move and provides experimental evidence to support our proposal. Our main claim is that the felicity of a scalar implicature cancellation depends on the discourse structure. More specifically, cancellation is acceptable only if it addresses a Question Under Discussion that differs from the previous one. As will be shown, this proposal has the additional benefit of permitting us to tease apart cancellations from self-repairs.