Abstract
Perspective taking has been proposed to be impaired in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially when implicit processing is required. In narrative texts, language perception and interpretation is fundamentally guided by taking the perspective of a narrator. We studied perspective taking in the linguistic domain of so-called Free Indirect Discourse (FID), during which certain text segments have to be interpreted as the thoughts or utterances of a protagonist without explicitly being marked as thought or speech representations of that protagonist (as in direct or indirect discourse). Crucially, the correct interpretation of text segments as FID depends on the ability to detect which of the protagonists “stands out” against the others and is therefore identifiable as implicit thinker or speaker. This so-called “prominence” status of a protagonist is based on linguistic properties (e.g., grammatical function, referential expression), in other words, the perspective is “hidden” and has to be inferred from the text material. In order to test whether this implicit perspective taking ability that is required for the interpretation of FID is preserved in persons with ASD, we presented short texts with three sentences to adults with and without ASD. In the last sentence, the perspective was switched either to the more or the less prominent of two protagonists. Participants were asked to rate the texts regarding their naturalness. Both diagnostic groups rated sentences with FID anchored to the less prominent protagonist as less natural than sentences with FID anchored to the more prominent protagonist. Our results that the high-level perspective taking ability in written language that is required for the interpretation of FID is well preserved in persons with ASD supports the conclusion that language skills are highly elaborated in ASD so that even the challenging attribution of utterances to protagonists is possible if they are only implicitly given. We discuss the implications in the context of claims of impaired perspective taking in ASD as well as with regard to the underlying processing of FID.
Highlights
One of two key symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) refers to social communication and interaction disturbances (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
With respect to the processes involved, we propose that the anchoring of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) depends both on perspective taking as well as on linguistic markers, on perspective taking and the ascription of the perspectival center of a text which in turn depends on the linguistic notion of prominence (Hinterwimmer, 2019)
We have shown that implicit perspective taking based on verbal abilities in the context of FID is fully preserved in ASD
Summary
One of two key symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) refers to social communication and interaction disturbances (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) One explanation for these phenomena is an impaired ability to take the perspective of others (Baron-Cohen et al, 1985; Frith et al, 1991), referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM; Premack and Woodruff, 1978) or mentalizing (Fonagy et al, 2004; Frith and Frith, 2006). Impairments are visible when inferring a protagonist’s mental state based on photo or video material (Baron-Cohen et al, 2001; Ponnet et al, 2004; Dziobek et al, 2006), which might explain why participants with ASD rely in their impressions formation of others significantly more on verbal than on nonverbal information (Kuzmanovic et al, 2011)
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