“I saw the yellowish going south”

Villiers, Jessica de

doi:10.1075/bjl.25.02vil

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…It is possible, of course, to increase an autistic individual's detection of irony by decreasing the need to genuinely integrate the speaker's perspective, for instance, by using forced-choice paradigms with clearly contrasted ironic and literal items (e.g. Chevallier et al 2011, Pexman et al 2011, Glenwright & Agbayewa 2012. I concur with Mognon et al (2021) that in such settings the correct response may be reached without resorting to mind reading, paralleling other studies in which nonautistic participants engage in perspective taking while autistic participants rely on alternative, egocentric strategies (Ostashchenko et al 2020, van Tiel et al 2021.…”

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Facing the complexity of language in autism (Response to commentators)

Kissine¹

2021

Language

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Introduction. The diversity and the scope of the responses to my target article (Kissine 2021) demonstrate the great potential linguistic research has for the field of autism. These responses also reveal, albeit sometimes implicitly, that a chief challenge in researching language in autism lies in the complexity and the subtlety of the data. In organizing my own response under this angle, I hope to react in a constructive way to most of the criticisms and suggestions voiced in these commentaries. In the next section, I return to the relationship between socio-communicative skills and language trajectories in autism; in particular, I argue that it is crucial to distinguish between predictors of language delays and those of language outcomes. Next, I discuss the complexity of pragmatics in autism, warning against reductionist attempts to subsume all data on pragmatics in autism under a single processing model. In the third section, I turn to the more general issue of the variability of individual profiles on the autism spectrum and ask how it can be integrated in a meaningful way within research on language in autism. I conclude this brief response to commentators by issuing a plea to think of the diversity of linguistic theories and schools as an opportunity for better understanding language in autism. Joint attention and language trajectories.There is little doubt that sociocommunicative skills-including but not limited to joint attention-increase the opportunity for linguistic experiences and enhance the child's access to language. When such skills are significantly below the typical range, as is the case for many young autistic children, language acquisition is very likely to be delayed. For instance, as pointed out by Arunachalam, Artis, and Luyster (2021) in their response, a robust association between response to joint attention and language levels in autistic children emerges from the meta-analysis by Bottema-Beutel (2016). 1 However, the close association between atypically low joint attention and the likelihood for an autistic child to be non-or minimally verbal (see e.g. the studies on minimally verbal autistic children by Wodka et al. 2013or Yoder et al. 2015 does not entail that joint attention also predicts how language levels will evolve.Not carefully distinguishing between predictors of language delays and those of language outcomes may lead to significant mischaracterizations of language trajectories in autism. Take, as a first example, the longitudinal study by Anderson et al. (2007), which, according to the response by Goldberg and Abbot-Smith (2021:e172), shows that 'joint attention is predictive of autistic language development' (emphasis theirs). Anderson et al. followed three groups from the ages of two to nine years: autistic children, children with a diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorders not otherwise specified, and children with a nonspectrum developmental condition. At the study onset and independent of the diagnostic group, joint-attention scores correlated (along

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confidence: 99%

Facing the complexity of language in autism (Response to commentators)

Kissine¹

2021

Language

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

et al. 2020

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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.

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Narrative production in autistic adults: A systematic analysis of the microstructure, macrostructure and internal state language

Geelhand

Papastamou

Deliens

et al. 2020

Journal of Pragmatics

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While narrative competence has been well documented in autistic children and young adolescents, fairly little is known about narrative performance of autistic adults. However, narrative abilities continue to develop well into adulthood. Hence, the main objective of the present study is to provide a clearer linguistic and communicative profile of ASD in adulthood by performing a systematic description of narrative performance in autistic adults. A specific annotation scheme was developed to code narrative production, in order to be able to compare the production of autistic participants to pairwise matched neurotypical adults relative to microstructure (syntactic complexity), macrostructure (overall story structure and cohesive ties) and internal state language of the corpus' narratives. The results suggest that autistic adults performed worse than their neurotypical peers on all three dimensions of narrative production, resulting in less coherent narratives overall for autistic adults.

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“I saw the yellowish going south”

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Facing the complexity of language in autism (Response to commentators)

Facing the complexity of language in autism (Response to commentators)

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

Narrative production in autistic adults: A systematic analysis of the microstructure, macrostructure and internal state language

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