The Understanding of Scalar Implicatures in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Dichotomized Responses to Violations of Informativeness

Abstract

This study investigated the understanding of underinformative sentences like “Some elephants have trunks” by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scalar term ‘some’ can be interpreted pragmatically, ‘Not all elephants have trunks,’ or logically, ‘Some and possibly all elephants have trunks.’ Literature indicates that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures, i.e., they often interpret them pragmatically, as controls do. This contrasts with the traditional claim of difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains, and is more in line with the idea that pragmatic problems are not universal. The aim of this study was to: (a) gain insight in the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures, and (b) do this by assessing not only sensitivity to underinformativeness, but also different degrees of tolerance to violations of informativeness. We employed a classic statement-evaluation task, presenting optimal, logical false, and underinformative utterances. In Experiment 1, children had to express their judgment on a binary option ‘I agree’ vs. ‘I disagree.’ In Experiment 2, a ternary middle answer option ‘I agree a bit’ was also available. Sixty-six Flemish-speaking 10-year-old children were tested: 22 children with ASD, an IQ-matched group, and an age-matched group. In the binary judgment task, the ASD group gave more pragmatic answers than the other groups, which was significant in the mixed effects logistic regression analysis, although not in the non-parametric analysis. In the ternary judgment task, the children with ASD showed a dichotomized attitude toward the speaker’s meaning, by tending to either fully agree or fully disagree with underinformative statements, in contrast with TD children, who preferred the middle option. Remarkably, the IQ-matched group exhibited the same pattern of results as the ASD group. Thanks to a fine-grained measure such as the ternary judgment task, this study highlighted a neglected aspect of the pragmatic profile of ASD, whose struggle with social communication seems to affect also the domain of informativeness. We discuss the implications of the dichotomized reaction toward violations of informativeness in terms of the potential role of ASD and of cognitive and verbal abilities.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies on metaphor comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: Do task properties matter?

“…Another aspect that should be weighed up when designing metaphor comprehension tasks in ASD research concerns the number of options provided in multiple-choice tasks. For instance, there is evidence from another pragmatic domain (i.e., scalar implicatures) that presenting two versus three options might account for the presence or absence of group differences between individuals with ASD and individuals with TD (Schaeken, Van Haeren, & Bambini, 2018).…”

Verbal and Figural Creativity in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development

“…Recent literature point to a larger debate on whether or not there is a pragmatic deficit in ASD (Deliens et al, 2018;Mazzaggio and Surian, 2018) with several scholars suggesting that the extent of pragmatic difficulties in ASD seems to vary depending on the specific kind of the required inference and on the possible mechanisms involved (Kissine, 2016;Andrés-Roqueta and Katsos, 2017). A recent study tested the unique pragmatic profile of individuals with ASD (Schaeken et al, 2018) using both a binary task (accept or reject a statement) and a novel ternary task (with a middle answer option). The study examined informativeness and scalar implicatures (linguistic expressions such as: all; many; some; must; should; may) in children with ASD.…”

Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task

“…Hence, it seems that in the binary task children are not insensitive to underinformativeness, but they do not show it, whereas in the ternary task sensitivity to informativeness is demonstrated through the possibility of showing tolerance to violations of informativeness, by choosing the middle value for underinformative statements. Wampers et al (2017) and Schaeken et al (2018) evidenced that, with such a ternary task, respectively patients with psychosis and children with autism spectrum disorder produce less pragmatic responses, while such a difference was not observed with the classic binary task. In other words, a more nuanced task revealed a previously not visible effect, casting new light on the range of pragmatic difficulties in atypical populations.…”