The Contribution of Grammar, Vocabulary and Theory of Mind in Pragmatic Language Competence in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

Pragmatic skills enable children to produce and comprehend words and sentences in ways that are appropriate to the conversational context. While structural language is known to vary widely in children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), pragmatic language has been claimed to be consistently impaired within this population, and has been considered a hallmark of ASD (Volden and Phillips, 2010). Specially, people with ASD frequently demonstrate unusual or inappropriate conversational behavior and deficits in a wide range of pragmatic skills (Philofsky et al., 2007). These difficulties have been experimentally demonstrated in detecting violations of maxims of conversation (Surian et al., 1996), understanding figurative language (Happé, 1993; Norbury, 2005), using context to disambiguate polysemous words (Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen, 1999; Brock et al., 2008), managing topic maintenance and topic shifts (Volden and Phillips, 2010), and comprehending humor, drawing inferences from narratives and understanding indirect requests (Ozonoff and Miller, 1996). Pragmatic difficulties are often attributed to intrinsic features of ASD. These include a weaker tendency to integrate information from the context (Weak Central Coherence; Happé and Frith, 2006), a deficit in Theory-of-Mind (ToM) that prevents children with ASD from inferring intentions and mental states of other people (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), a deficit in executive functions such as poor inhibition or cognitive flexibility (Hill, 2004) or lack of social motivation as a result of an attenuated social instinct (Chevallier et al., 2012)