Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often described as being characterised by a uniform pragmatic impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that some areas of pragmatic functioning are preserved. This study seeks to determine to which extent context-based derivation of non-linguistically encoded meaning is functional in ASD. We compare the performance of 24 adults with ASD, and matched neuro-typical adults in two act-out pragmatic tasks. The first task examines generation of indirect request interpretations, and the second the comprehension of irony. Intact contextual comprehension of indirect requests contrasts with marked difficulties in understanding irony. These results suggest that preserved pragmatics in ASD is limited to egocentric processing of context, which does not rely on assumptions about the speaker's mental states.

In this paper, we investigate the interpretation of negated antonyms. A sentence such as Peter is not tall can be understood as meaning either that Peter is not tall tout court or that Peter is rather short (inference towards the antonym; ITA). We present the results of two experiments, in which we test two theoretical predictions. First, according to Krifka (2007), it is reasonable to expect a stronger ITA effect for positive versus negative adjectives. Second, elaborating on Krifka (2007), we expect ITA strength asymmetry to be greater for morphological antonymic pairs than for non-morphological pairs. In the first experiment, ITA strength was assessed implicitly by having participants judge the pragmatic acceptability of sentences involving a negated adjective and its antonym. In the second experiment, we collected explicit inferential judgments. The results of both experiments support the two predictions. We also discuss theoretical and methodological issues concerning the different notions of polarity.

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