Schaeken Walter, Van Haeren Marie, Bambini Valentina
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Center for Neurocognition, Epistemology and theoretical Syntax (NEtS), University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Pavia, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2018 Jul 23;9:1266. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01266. eCollection 2018.
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.
本研究调查了自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童对像“有些大象有象鼻”这样信息不足句子的理解。标量词“有些”可以从语用角度解释为“并非所有大象都有象鼻”，或者从逻辑角度解释为“有些大象并且可能所有大象都有象鼻”。文献表明，患有ASD的成年人在解释标量含义方面没有真正的困难，即他们通常像对照组一样从语用角度进行解释。这与传统观点中ASD患者在其他语用领域存在困难形成对比，并且更符合语用问题并非普遍存在的观点。本研究的目的是：（a）深入了解ASD儿童推导标量含义的能力，以及（b）通过不仅评估对信息不足的敏感度，还评估对违反信息性的不同容忍程度来实现这一目的。我们采用了经典的陈述评估任务，呈现最优、逻辑错误和信息不足的话语。在实验1中，儿童必须在“我同意”与“我不同意”的二元选项中表达他们的判断。在实验2中，还提供了“我有点同意”的三元中间答案选项。对66名讲佛兰芒语的10岁儿童进行了测试：22名ASD儿童、一个智商匹配组和一个年龄匹配组。在二元判断任务中，ASD组给出的语用答案比其他组更多，在混合效应逻辑回归分析中这具有显著性，尽管在非参数分析中并非如此。在三元判断任务中，ASD儿童对说话者的意思表现出一种二分的态度，倾向于要么完全同意要么完全不同意信息不足的陈述，这与典型发展（TD）儿童不同，后者更喜欢中间选项。值得注意的是，智商匹配组呈现出与ASD组相同的结果模式。由于采用了像三元判断任务这样精细的测量方法，本研究突出了ASD语用特征中一个被忽视的方面，其在社会交流方面的困难似乎也影响到了信息性领域。我们从ASD以及认知和语言能力的潜在作用方面讨论了对违反信息性的二分反应的影响。
