Petit Nicolas, Geoffray Cassar Marie-Maude, Baltazar Matias
Le Vinatier Psychiatrie Universitaire Lyon Métropole, Lyon, France.
Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CNRS, INSERM, Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon CRNL U1028 UMR5292, F-69500, Bron, France.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2025 Apr 17. doi: 10.1007/s10803-025-06838-4.
Autism is classically associated with difficulties in pragmatic inferences, resulting in an over-literal interpretation of language. This has mostly been observed with figurative language (e.g., metaphors). In contrast, more recent investigations of another type of inference, scalar implicatures, have mostly failed to spot any difference between autistic and neurotypical individuals, raising concerns about any general claim of pragmatic difficulties in autism. However, both lines of research face issues: language demands rather than pragmatic competence might actually explain group differences on metaphor tasks, and scalar implicatures have mostly been assessed with truth judgment tasks, which might bias their results. This work aims to assess whether this contrast between metaphors and scalars can be observed within a single group of autistic children. A group of autistic children (N = 23) was compared to a larger sample of neurotypical children (N = 237), using innovative scalar implicatures and metaphors tablet tasks that address the methodological concerns raised in the literature. The autistic group showed a reverse contrast from what was expected, with poorer scalar implicature but similar metaphor comprehension, consistently at accuracy and response times levels. We discuss the possibility that, complementary to previous accounts, a dimension opposing guided to spontaneous pragmatic processes might explain this result and the challenges faced by autistic individuals in daily situations.
传统上，自闭症与语用推理困难相关，导致对语言的过度字面解释。这在比喻性语言（如隐喻）中最为常见。相比之下，最近对另一种推理——等级含义——的研究大多未能发现自闭症个体与神经典型个体之间存在任何差异，这引发了人们对自闭症语用困难这一普遍说法的担忧。然而，这两类研究都面临问题：可能实际上是语言要求而非语用能力解释了隐喻任务中的群体差异，而且等级含义大多是通过真值判断任务来评估的，这可能会使结果产生偏差。这项研究旨在评估在一组自闭症儿童中是否能观察到隐喻和等级含义之间的这种差异。使用创新的等级含义和隐喻平板电脑任务，针对文献中提出的方法学问题，将一组自闭症儿童（N = 23）与更大样本的神经典型儿童（N = 237）进行比较。自闭症组呈现出与预期相反的差异，等级含义理解较差，但隐喻理解能力相似，在准确性和反应时间方面均如此。我们讨论了一种可能性，即与之前的观点互补，一个将引导性语用过程与自发性语用过程相对立的维度可能解释这一结果以及自闭症个体在日常情境中面临的挑战。
