Abstract
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are often said to present a global pragmatic impairment. However, there is some observational evidence that context-based comprehension of indirect requests may be preserved in autism. In order to provide experimental confirmation to this hypothesis, indirect speech act comprehension was tested in a group of 15 children with autism between 7 and 12 years and a group of 20 typically developing children between 2:7 and 3:6 years. The aim of the study was to determine whether children with autism can display genuinely contextual understanding of indirect requests. The experiment consisted of a three-pronged semi-structured task involving Mr Potato Head. In the first phase a declarative sentence was uttered by one adult as an instruction to put a garment on a Mr Potato Head toy; in the second the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by another speaker; in the third phase the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by the first speaker. Children with autism complied with the indirect request in the first phase and demonstrated the capacity to inhibit the directive interpretation in phases 2 and 3. TD children had some difficulty in understanding the indirect instruction in phase 1. These results call for a more nuanced view of pragmatic dysfunction in autism.
Highlights
Specific difficulties in pragmatic dimensions of language indisputably constitute one of the most salient and readily quoted correlates of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
The results clearly show that children with autism can comply with an indirect request uttered in a declarative sentence form (He has no hat)
Somehow in contradiction with earlier studies cf. [36,37,38], young typically developing (TD) children seem to find it somewhat difficult to comply with such indirect requests
Summary
Specific difficulties in pragmatic dimensions of language indisputably constitute one of the most salient and readily quoted correlates of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). An addressee must possess certain pragmatic skills if he is to use context in order to reach the literal interpretation intended by the speaker. When the speaker produces an indirect request by using the interrogative sentence Can you close the window? Correct interpretation requires that the addressee understand that the speaker is not enquiring about his physical capacity to close the window, but telling him to do so. In most contexts the correct interpretation of an interrogative like Can you run for 1 hour? Children with Autism Understand Indirect Speech Acts. In most contexts the correct interpretation of an interrogative like Can you run for 1 hour? amounts to PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0142191 November 9, 2015
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