Linguistic processing in high-functioning adults with autism or Asperger's syndrome. Is global coherence impaired?

Abstract

The results suggest that individuals on the autism spectrum have impaired global coherence. Arranging sentences and making global inferences correlated highly, suggesting that central coherence may be a unitary force in these different tasks. Of the two clinical groups, the autism group had the greater deficit. The effect that such a deficit would have on one's daily life is discussed, along with possible explanations for the clinical groups' greater difficulty, and suggestions for future research.

Decontextualised Minds: Adolescents with Autism are Less Susceptible to the Conjunction Fallacy than Typically Developing Adolescents

“…This evidence shows, for example, that autistic participants are less able to use sentence context to arrive at an appropriate understanding of sentence meaning (Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen 1999) or to make accurate context dependent inferences from short stories (Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen 2000). However, there is some evidence that autistic people can engage in global processing and show sensitivity to context if explicitly instructed to do so (Snowling and Frith 1986).…”

Pragmatic Inferences in High-Functioning Adults with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“…Studies that have examined pragmatic inferences in ASD have focused on bridging inferences and global inferences required for text interpretation (Dennis et al 2001;BaronCohen 1999, 2000). People with ASD were found to be less able to use contextual information to make a global inference in a sentence arrangement task (Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen 2000), and were less likely to choose a bridging inference to make a scenario coherent if they had to select from a list of alternatives (Jolliffe and BaronCohen 1999). These findings indicate that people with autism have difficulty understanding language in context, and it has been argued that these findings support the weak central coherence account of ASD.…”

“…The weak central coherence account claims that people with ASD have a processing bias for details at the expense of the global picture (Frith 2003;Happé 1999;Happé and Frith 2006). Evidence for this pattern has been found in various visual tasks (Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen 2001), as well as in linguistic tasks (Happé 1997;Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen 2000). For example, in a homograph task, in which the correct pronunciation of a word was determined by the preceding sentence, participants with ASD failed to use the correct pronunciation and thus presumably did not fully integrate linguistic information in context (Frith and Snowling 1983;Happé 1997).…”

Towards an understanding of the mechanisms of weak central coherence effects: experiments in visual configural learning and auditory perception

“…An example of 'low' level weak central coherence that has been cited is the exceptionally good performance of indi-viduals with autism on the embedded figures task and the block design subtest of the Wechsler intelligence scales (Shah & Frith 1983Happé et al 2001), as success on these tasks requires the participant to process the local parts of the stimuli and to ignore the visual context in which the stimuli are presented. The term 'high' level weak central coherence has been used to describe studies of contextual processing, such as mispronunciation of homographs in sentence context and drawing incorrect bridging inferences between two sentences by individuals with autism (Happé 1997;Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen 1999). Thus, 'low' level weak central coherence has been used to refer to processes such as perception, learning and attention whilst 'high' level weak central coherence has been used to refer to linguistic and semantic processes.…”