Pragmatic Abilities in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Study in Philosophy and the Empirical

Villiers, Jessica de; Stainton, Robert J.; Szatmári, Péter

doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.2007.00151.x

Cited by 29 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…They took the story about the chairman who harms or helps the environment and presented it to subjects with Asperger's syndrome, a developmental disorder characterized by difficulties in certain forms of communication and a striking inability to interact normally with others. Previous studies had shown that subjects with Asperger's display remarkable deficits in the capacity to understand conversational pragmatics, tending instead to answer questions in the most literal possible way (e.g., De Villiers et al 2006;Surian et al 1996). If the original effect had been due entirely to pragmatic processes, one might therefore have expected subjects with Asperger's to respond quite differently from neurotypical subjects.…”

Section: The Conversational Pragmatics Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 89%

Person as Scientist, Person as Moralist

Knobe¹

2014

Experimental Philosophy

147

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widelyheld view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people's moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.

show abstract

Section: The Conversational Pragmatics Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 89%

Person as Scientist, Person as Moralist

Knobe¹

2014

Experimental Philosophy

147

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In line with this idea, de Villiers et al (2007) claim that some of the pragmatic determinants of the literal content are preserved in the conversation of persons with high‐functioning autism and Asperger syndrome. Among these, they report the resolution of accidental homonymy (e.g.…”

Section: Pragmatics In Asdsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Pragmatics, Cognitive Flexibility and Autism Spectrum Disorders

Kissine

2012

Mind & Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Pragmatic deficits of persons with autism spectrum disorders [ASDs] are often traced back to a dysfunction in Theory of Mind. However, the exact nature of the link between pragmatics and mindreading in autism is unclear. Pragmatic deficits in ASDs are not homogenous: in particular, while inter-subjective dimensions are affected, some other pragmatic capacities seem to be relatively preserved. Moreover, failure on classical false-belief tasks stems from executive problems that go beyond belief attribution; false-belief tasks require taking an alternative perspective on the reality. While this capacity is functional in typically developing young children, it is impaired in ASDs. Typically developing children are capable of taking their interlocutor's perspective into account when communicating, whereas poor cognitive flexibility makes it difficult for persons with ASDs to grasp the inter-subjective character of communicative stimuli. This analysis predicts that those pragmatic processes that amount to merely taking into account salient contextual facts during utterance interpretation, without necessarily adopting the interlocutor's perspective, may be preserved in ASDs.

show abstract

“…This view has also been supported by empirical research in children with and without communication disorders, suggesting that, for some kinds of pragmatics, a sentence may be fully interpretable based on pragmatic norms and the context as provided from the listeners' egocentric point of view, without the need to infer the speakers' mental state (de Villiers et al, 2007; Kissine, 2012; O'Neill, 2012; Kissine et al, 2015; Janke and Perovic, 2016). …”

Section: Two Different Pragmatic Skills: Linguistic- Vs Social-pragmmentioning

confidence: 89%