Hostname: page-component-76c49bb84f-ndtt8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-07T18:15:20.401Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Quantity-based reasoning in the broader autism phenotype: A web-based study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2018

BOB VAN TIEL  and
MIKHAIL KISSINE
BOB VAN TIEL*
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS)
MIKHAIL KISSINE
Affiliation:
Université Libre de Bruxelles
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Bob van Tiel, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Schützenstrasse 18, 10118 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: bobvantiel@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We conducted a web-based study investigating whether the probability of deriving four types of pragmatic inferences depends on the degree to which one has traits associated with the autism spectrum, as measured by the autism spectrum quotient test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001). In line with previous research, we show that, independently of their autism spectrum quotient, participants are likely to derive those pragmatic inferences that can be derived by reasoning solely about alternatives that the speaker could have used. However, if the derivation of the pragmatic inference draws upon more complex counterfactual reasoning about what the speaker could have said, the probability that it is derived decreases significantly with one’s autism quotient. We discuss the consequences for theories of pragmatics in autism and for linguistic theorizing in general.

Keywords

broader autism phenotypeconversational implicaturelanguagepragmaticsscalar implicature

Information

Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 39 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 1373 - 1403
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Altman, D. G., & Royston, P. (2006). The cost of dichotomising continuous variables. BMJ, 332, 1080.Google Scholar
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 5th ed, Washington, DC: Author.Google Scholar
Andrés-Roqueta, C., & Katsos, N. (2017). The contribution of grammar, vocabulary and theory of mind in pragmatic language competence in children with autistic spectrum disorders. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 996.Google Scholar
Barner, D., Brooks, N., & Bale, A. (2011). Accessing the unsaid: The role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference. Cognition, 118, 84–93.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S. (1988). Social and pragmatic deficits in autism: Cognitive or affective? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 18, 379–402.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Skinner, R., Martin, J., & Clubley, E. (2001). The autism spectrum quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger syndrome / high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31, 5–17.Google Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.Google Scholar
Bates, D., & Maechler, M. (2009. lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. R package version 0.999375-32. Available from http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4.Google Scholar
Birnbaum, M. H. (2004). Human research and data collection via the internet. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 803–832.Google Scholar
Bloom, P., & German, T. (2000). Two reasons to abandon the false belief task as a test of theory of mind. Cognition, 77, B25–B31.Google Scholar
Bott, L., & Noveck, I. A. (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 437–457.Google Scholar
Breheny, R., Katsos, N., & Williams, J. (2006). Are generalized scalar implicatures generated by default? An online investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition, 100, 434–463.Google Scholar
Brock, J., Norbury, C. F., Einav, S., & Nation, K. (2008). Do individuals with autism process words in context? Evidence from language-mediated eye-mouvements. Cognition, 108, 896–904.Google Scholar
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S. D. (2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 3–5.Google Scholar
Chemla, E., & Bott, L. (2014). Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: Disjunctions and free choice. Cognition, 130, 380–396.Google Scholar
Chevallier, C., Kohls, G., Troiani, V., Brodkin, E. S., & Schultz, R. T. (2012). The social motivation theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 231–239.Google Scholar
Chevallier, C., Noveck, I., Happé, F. G. E., & Wilson, D. (2011). What’s in a voice? Prosody as a test case for the Theory of Mind account of autism. Neuropsychologia, 49, 507–517.Google Scholar
Chevallier, C., Noveck, I. A., Nazir, T., Bott, L., Lanzetti, V., & Sperber, D. (2008). Making disjunctions exclusive. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 1741–1760.Google Scholar
Chevallier, C., Wilson, D., Happé, F., & Noveck, I. (2010). Scalar inferences in autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40, 1104–1117.Google Scholar
Chierchia, G. (2004). Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena and the syntax/pragmatics interface. In A. Belletti (Ed.), Structures and beyond (pp 39–103). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Colich, N. L., Wang, A.-T., Rudie, J. D., Hernandez, L. M., Bookheimer, S. Y., & Dapretto, M. (2012). Atypical neural processing of ironic and sincere remarks in children and adolescent with autism spectrum disorders. Metaphor and Symbol, 27, 70–92.Google Scholar
Crnič, L., Chemla, E., & Fox, D. (2015). Scalar implicatures of embedded disjunction. Natural Language Semantics, 23, 271–305.Google Scholar
DeClerck, R. (1988). Studies on copular sentences, clefts and pseudoclefts. Leuven. Leuven University Press.Google Scholar
Degen, J., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2016). Availability of alternatives and the processing of scalar implicatures: A visual world eye-tracking study. Cognitive Science, 40, 172–201.Google Scholar
Deliens, G., Papastamou, F., Ruytenbeek, N., Geelhand de Merxem, P., & Kissine, M. (2018. Selective pragmatic impairment in autism spectrum disorder: Indirect requests vs. irony. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Advance online publication.Google Scholar
Dennis, M., Lazenby, A. L., & Lockyer, L. (2001). Inferential language in high-function children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31, 47–54.Google Scholar
de Villiers, J., Fine, J., Ginsberg, G., Vaccarella, L., & Szatmari, P. (2006). Brief report: A scale for rating conversational impairment in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37, 1375–1380.Google Scholar
de Vries, M., & Geurts, H. M. (2012). Cognitive flexibility in ASD; task switching with emotional faces. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42, 2558–2568.Google Scholar
Dufter, A. (2009). Clefting and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and Romance. In A. Dufter & D. Jacob (Eds.), Focus and background in Romance languages (pp. 83–121). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Fisher, N., Happé, F., & Dunn, J. (2005). The relationship between vocabulary, grammar, and false belief task performance in children with autistic spectrum disorders and children with moderate learning difficulties. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 46, 409–419.Google Scholar
Fox, D. (2007). Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures. In U. Sauerland & P. Stateva (Eds.), Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (pp 71–120). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar
Fox, D., & Katzir, R. (2010). On the characterization of alternatives. Natural Language Semantics, 19, 87–107.Google Scholar
Franke, M. (2009). Signal to act: Game theory in pragmatics (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam).Google Scholar
Frith, U., & De Vignemont, F. (2005). Egocentrism, allocentrism, and Asperger syndrome. Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 719–738.Google Scholar
Frith, U., & Happé, F. (1994). Autism beyond “theory of mind. Cognition, 50, 115–132.Google Scholar
Gazdar, G. (1979). Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition, and logical form. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Geis, M. L., & Zwicky, A. M. (1971). On invited inferences. Linguistic Inquiry, 2, 61–66.Google Scholar
Geurts, B. (2010). Quantity implicatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gibson, E., Piantadosi, S., & Fedorenko, K. (2011). Using Mechanical Turk to obtain and analyze English acceptability judgments. Language and Linguistics Compass, 5, 509–524.Google Scholar
Grant, C. M., Riggs, K. J., & Boucher, J. (2004). Counterfactual and mental state reasoning in children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34, 177–188.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review, 66, 377–388.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975a). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 3. Speech acts (pp 41–58). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975b). Method in philosophical psychology (from the banal to the bizarre). Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 48, 23–53.Google Scholar
Grodner, D. J., Klein, N. M., Carbary, K. M., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2010). “Some,” and possibly all, scalar inferences are not delayed: Evidence for immediate pragmatic enrichment. Cognition, 116, 42–55.Google Scholar
Happé, F. G. E. (1993). Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism: A test of relevance theory. Cognition, 48, 101–119.Google Scholar
Happé, F. G. E. (1995). The role of age and verbal ability in the theory of mind task performance of subjects with autism. Child Development, 66, 843–855.Google Scholar
Happé, F. G. E., & Frith, U. (2006). The weak coherence account: Detail-focused cognitive style in autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36, 5–25.Google Scholar
Hartmann, K., & Veenstra, T. (2013). Introduction. In K. Hartmann & T. Veenstra (Eds.), Cleft structures (pp 1–34). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Heavey, L., Phillips, W., Baron-Cohen, S., & Rutter, M. (2000). The awkward moments test: A naturalistic measure of social understanding in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 30, 395–406.Google Scholar
Hill, E. (2004). Executive dysfunction in autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 26–32.Google Scholar
Horn, L. R. (1972. On the semantic properties of logical operators in English (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles).Google Scholar
Horn, L. R. (1981). Exhaustiveness and the semantics of clefts. Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society, 11, 125–142.Google Scholar
Huang, Y. T., & Snedeker, J. (2009). On-line interpretation of scalar quantifiers: Insight into the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 376–415.Google Scholar
Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, C., & Russell, J. (1993). Autistic children’s difficulty with mental disengagement from an object: Its implications for theories of autism. Developmental Psychology, 29, 498–510.Google Scholar
Ingersoll, B., & Wainer, A. (2014). The broader autism phenotype. In F. R. Volkmar, R. Paul, S. J.Rogers & K. A. Pelphrey (Eds.), Handbook of autism and pervasive developmental disorders, 4th ed, pp 28–56). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Jolliffe, T., & Baron-Cohen, S. (1999a). The strange story test: A replication with high-functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 29, 395–406.Google Scholar
Jolliffe, T., & Baron-Cohen, S. (1999b). A test of central coherence theory: Linguistic processing in high-functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome: Is local coherence impaired. Cognition, 71, 149–185.Google Scholar
Kaland, N., Mortensen, E. L., & Smith, L. (2011). Social communication impairments in children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome: Slow response time and the impact of prompting. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 5, 1129–1137.Google Scholar
Katzir, R. (2007). Structurally-defined alternatives. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30, 669–690.Google Scholar
Kissine, M. (2012). Pragmatics, cognitive flexibility and autism spectrum disorders. Mind & Language, 27, 1–28.Google Scholar
Kissine, M. (2013). From utterances to speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kissine, M. (2016). Pragmatics as meta-cognitive control. Frontiers in Psychology, 6.Google Scholar
Kissine, M., Cano-Chervel, J., Carlier, S., De Brabanter, P., Ducenne, L., Pairon, M.-C., & … Leybaert, J. (2015). cpeech acts: Evidence from a semi-structured act-out task. PLOS ONE, 10, e0142191.Google Scholar
Kissine, M., De Brabanter, P., & Leybaert, J. (2012). The interpretation of requests in children with autism: The effect of the sentence-type. Autism, 16, 523–532.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lilje, G. W. (1972). Uninvited inferences. Linguistic Inquiry, 3, 540–542.Google Scholar
Lord, C., Risi, S., Lambrecht, L., Cook, E. H., Leventhal, B. L., DiLavoreP. C., … P. C., …, & Rutter, M. (2000). The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule—Generic: A standard measure of social and communication deficits associated with the spectrum of autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 30, 205–223.Google Scholar
Loukusa, S., Leinonen, E., Kuusikko, S., Jussila, K., Mattila, M.-L., RyderN., … N., …, & Moilanen, I. (2006). Use of context in pragmatic language comprehension by children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37, 1049–1059.Google Scholar
Nadig, A., Lee, I., Singh, L., Bosshart, K., & Ozonoff, S. (2010). How does the topic of conversation affect verbal exchange and eye gaze? A comparison between typical development and high-functioning autism. Neuropsychologia, 48, 2730–2739.Google Scholar
Nation, I. S. P., & Beglar, D. (2007). A vocabulary size test. Language Teacher, 31, 9–13.Google Scholar
Nichols, S., & Stich, S. P. (2003). Mindreading: An integrated account of pretence, self-awareness, and understanding other minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Norbury, C. F. (2005). Barking up the wrong tree? Lexical ambiguity resolution in children with language impairments and autistic spectrum disorders. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 90, 141–171.Google Scholar
Norbury, C. F. (2014). Practitioner review: Social (pragmatic) communication disorder conceptualization, evidence and clinical implications. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 55, 204–216.Google Scholar
Noveck, I. A. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition, 78, 165–188.Google Scholar
Ozonoff, S. (1997). Components of executive function in autism. In J. Russell (Ed.) Autism as an executive disorder (pp 179–211). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ozonoff, S., South, M., & Provencal, S. (2005). Executive functions. In F. R.Volkmar, R. Paul, A. Klin & D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of autism and pervasive developmental disorders, 3rd ed, pp 606–627). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Paul, R., & Cohen, D. J. (1985). Comprehension of indirect requests in adults with autistic disorders and mental retardation. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 28, 475–479.Google Scholar
Paul, R., Orlovski, S. M., Marcinko, H. C., & Volkmar, F. (2008). Conversational behaviors in youth with high-functioning ASD and Asperger syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 39, 115–125.Google Scholar
Pavey, E. L. (2004. The English it-cleft construction: A role and reference grammar analysis (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Sussex).Google Scholar
Perkins, M. R. (2007). Pragmatic impairment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Perner, J., Rendl, B., & Garnham, A. (2007). Objects of desire, thought, and reality: Problems of anchoring discourse referents in development. Mind & Language, 22, 475–513.Google Scholar
Pijnacker, J., Hagoort, P., van Buitelaar, J., Teunisse, J.-P., & Geurts, B. (2009). Pragmatic inferences in high-functioning adults with autism and Asperger syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 39, 607–618.Google Scholar
Prior, M., & Hoffmann, W. (1990). Neuropsychological testing of autistic children through an exploration with frontal lobe tests. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 20, 581–590.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2006). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Recanati, F. (2003). Literal meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ritchie, D. (2013). Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Russell, J. (2002). Cognitive theories of autism. In J. E. Harrison & A. M. Owen (Eds.), Cognitive deficits in brain disorders (pp 295–323). London: Dunitz.Google Scholar
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (2002). Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading. Mind & Language, 17, 3–23.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J. (2011). A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory. Behavior Research Methods, 43, 155–167.Google Scholar
Storto, G., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2005). Are scalar implicatures computed online?. In E. Maier, C. Bary & J. Huitink (Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 9 (pp 431–445). Nijmegen: Nijmegen Centre for Semantics.Google Scholar
Su, Y., & Su, L.-Y. (2015). Interpretation of logical words in Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorders: Uncovering knowledge of semantics and pragmatics. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 45, 1938–1950.Google Scholar
Sucksmith, E., Roth, I., & Hoekstra, R. A. (2011). Autistic traits below the clinical threshold: Re-examining the broader autism phenotype in the 21st century. Neuropsychological Review, 21, 360–389.Google Scholar
Surian, L., & Leslie, A. M. (1999). Competence and performance in false belief understanding: A comparison of autistic and normal 3-year-old children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 17, 141–155.Google Scholar
Tieu, L., Romoli, J., Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2016). Children’s knowledge of free choice inferences and scalar implicatures. Journal of Semantics, 33, 269–298.Google Scholar
Vallduví, E. (1993. The informational component (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania).Google Scholar
van Tiel, B., & Geurts, B. (2014). Truth and typicality in the interpretation of quantifiers. In U. Etxeberria, A. Flu, A. Irurtzun, & B. Leferman (Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 18 (pp. 451–468). Bayonne and Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, September 11–13, 2014.Google Scholar
van Tiel, B., & Schaeken, W. (2017). Processing conversational implicatures: Alternatives and counterfactual reasoning. Cognitive Science, 41, 1119–1154.Google Scholar
Wheelwright, S., Auyeung, B., Allison, C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2008). Defining the broader, medium and narrow autism phenotype among parents using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Molecular Autism, 1, 1–10.Google Scholar
Yirmiya, N., Erel, O., Shaked, M., & Solomonica-Levi, D. (1998). Meta-analyses comparing theory of mind abilities of individuals with autism, individuals with mental retardation, and normally developing individuals. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 283–307.Google Scholar
Zelazo, P. D., Jacques, S., Burack, J. A., & Frye, D. (2002). The relation between theory of mind and rule use: Evidence from persons with autism-spectrum disorders. Infant and Child Development, 11, 171–195.Google Scholar