Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-76mfw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-19T09:34:14.737Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The art of common ground: emergence of a complex pragmatic language skill in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2015

ASHLEY DE MARCHENA  and
INGE-MARIE EIGSTI
ASHLEY DE MARCHENA*
Affiliation:
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, USA
INGE-MARIE EIGSTI
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Ashley de Marchena, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia – Center for Autism Research, 3535 Market Street, Suite 860 Philadelphia Pennsylvania 19104, United States. e-mail: demarchenaa@email.chop.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Deficits in pragmatic language are central to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we investigate common ground, a pragmatic language skill in which speakers adjust the contents of their speech based on their interlocutor's perceived knowledge, in adolescents with ASD and typical development (TD), using an experimental narrative paradigm. Consistent with prior research, TD participants produced shorter narrations when they shared knowledge with an interlocutor, an effect not observed at the group level in ASD. This effect was unrelated to general skills such as IQ or receptive vocabulary. In ASD, the effect was correlated with age and symptom severity: older and less severely affected participants did shorten their narratives. Several metrics (including explicit references to common ground, speech disfluencies, and communicative quality ratings) suggested that, although adolescents with ASD did not show implicit reductions in their narrative length, they were aware of common ground, and communicated differently in its presence.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 43 - 80
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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

Footnotes

[*]

This work was completed as part of the first author's doctoral dissertation. She would like to thank her committee for their support and feedback: Drs Deborah Fein, Marie Coppola, Marianne Barton, and James Dixon. We thank all members of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Connecticut for help with data collection and coding. Many thanks to the staff at The Learning Clinic in Brooklyn, Connecticut for facilitating the data collection process. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the manuscript. Finally, thank you to all the adolescents who participated in this study and their gracious families. Research was (in part) supported by a Fulbright (US Department of State) US Student Fellowship, the Theodore Millon Dissertation Scholarship, and the University of Connecticut Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to the first author. This project was (in part) supported by Award number T32NS007413 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The content is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NINDS of the National Institutes of Health.

References

REFERENCES

Ackerman, B. P., Szymanski, J. & Silver, D. (1990). Children's use of the common ground in interpreting ambiguous referential utterances. Developmental Psychology 26, 234–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andersen, E. (1990). Speaking with style. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Arnold, J., Bennetto, L. & Diehl, J. (2009). Reference production in young speakers with and without autism: effects of discourse status and processing constraints. Cognition 110, 131–146.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Arnold, J. & Griffin, Z. (2007). The effect of additional characters on choice of referring expression: everyone counts. Journal of Memory and Language 56, 521–536.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Capps, L., Kehres, J. & Sigman, M. (1998). Conversational abilities among children with autism and children with developmental delays. Autism 2, 325–344.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Capps, L., Losh, M. & Thurber, C. (2000). The frog ate the bug and made his mouth sad: narrative competence in children with autism. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 28, 193–204.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, E. & Bernicot, J. (2008). Repetition as ratification: how parents and children place information in common ground. Journal of Child Language 35, 349–371.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, H. H. & Carlson, T. B. (1982). Hearers and speech acts. Language 58, 332–373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Constantino, J. & Gruber, C. (2005). The Social Responsiveness Scale. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.Google Scholar
Constantino, J. & Todd, R. (2003). Autistic traits in the general population: a twin study. Archives of General Psychiatry 60, 524–530.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Marchena, A. & Eigsti, I. M. (2010). Conversational gestures in autism spectrum disorders: asynchrony but not decreased frequency. Autism Research 3, 311–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Marchena, A., Eigsti, I., Worek, A., Ono, K. & Snedeker, J. (2011). Mutual exclusivity in autism spectrum disorders: testing the pragmatic hypothesis. Cognition 119, 96–113.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Diehl, J. J., Bennetto, L. & Young, E. C. (2006). Story recall and narrative competence in high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 34, 83–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunn, L. & Dunn, L. (1997). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, 3rd ed. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Eales, M. (1993). Pragmatic impairments in adults with childhood diagnoses of autism or developmental receptive language disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 23, 593–617.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eigsti, I. M. & Bennetto, L. (2009). Grammaticality judgments in autism: Deviance or delay? Journal of Child Language 36, 999–1021.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Epley, N., Keysar, B., Van Boven, L. & Gilovich, T. (2004). Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87, 327–339.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Glucksberg, S. & Krauss, R. M. (1967). What do people say after they have learned to talk? Studies of the development of referential communication. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development 13, 309–316.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (eds), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: speech acts (pp. 113–128). New York: Seminar Press.Google Scholar
Hanna, J., Tanenhaus, M. & Trueswell, J. (2003). The effects of common ground and perspective on domains of referential interpretation. Journal of Memory and Language 49, 43–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holler, J. & Wilkin, K. (2009). Communicating common ground: how mutually shared knowledge influences speech and gesture in a narrative task. Language and Cognitive Processes 24, 267–289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horton, W. & Gerrig, R. (2005). The impact of memory demands on audience design during language production. Cognition 96, 127–142.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Horton, W. & Keysar, B. (1996). When do speakers take into account common ground? Cognition 59, 91–117.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hudson-D'Zmura, S. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Assigning antecedents to ambiguous pronouns: the role of the center of attention as the default assignment. In Walker, M., Joshi, A. & Prince, E. (eds), Centering theory in discourse (pp. 199–226). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Krauss, R. M. & Weinheimer, S. (1966). Concurrent feedback, confirmation, and the encoding of referents in verbal communication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4, 343–346.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lake, J. K., Humphreys, K. R. & Cardy, S. (2011). Listener vs. speaker-oriented aspects of speech: studying the disfluencies of individuals with autism spectrum disorders. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 18, 135–140.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Landa, R. (2000). Social language use in Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism. In Klin, A., Volkmar, F. R. & Sparrow, S. S. (eds), Asperger syndrome (pp. 125–155). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Liles, B., Duffy, R., Merritt, D. & Purcell, S. (1995). Measurement of narrative discourse ability in children with language disorders. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 38, 415–425.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lord, C., Rutter, M., DiLavore, P. C. & Risi, S. (2002). Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.Google Scholar
Lord, C., Rutter, M. & LeCouteur, A. (1994). Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised: a revised version of a diagnostic interview for caregivers of individuals with possible pervasive developmental disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 24, 659–685.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Losh, M. & Capps, L. (2003). Narrative ability in high-functioning children with autism or Asperger's syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 33, 239–251.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Loveland, K. A., McEvoy, R. & Tunali, B. (1990). Narrative story telling in autism and Down's syndrome. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 8, 9–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McPartland, J. C., Webb, S. J., Keehn, B. & Dawson, G. (2011). Patterns of visual attention to faces and objects in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 41, 148–157.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nadig, A. & Sedivy, J. (2002). Evidence of perspective-taking constraints in children's on-line reference resolution. Psychological Science 13, 329–336.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nadig, A., Vivanti, G. & Ozonoff, S. (2009). Adaptation of object descriptions to a partner under increasing communicative demands: a comparison of children with and without autism. Autism Research 2, 334–347.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nilsen, E. & Graham, S. (2009). The relations between children's communicative perspective-taking and executive functioning. Cognitive Psychology 58, 220–249.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norbury, C. & Bishop, D. (2003). Narrative skills of children with communication impairments. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 38, 287–313.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
O'Neill, D. K. & Holmes, A. C. (2002). Young preschoolers’ ability to reference story characters: the contribution of gestures and character speech. First Language 22, 73–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Neill, D. K. & Topolovec, J. C. (2001). Two-year-old children's sensitivity to the referential (in)efficacy of their own pointing gestures. Journal of Child Language 28, 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perkins, M. (1998). Is pragmatics epiphenomenal? Evidence from communication disorders. Journal of Pragmatics 29, 291–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perner, J., Frith, U., Leslie, A. M. & Leekam, S. R. (1989). Exploration of the autistic child's theory of mind: knowledge, belief, and communication. Child Development 60, 689–700.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perner, J. & Leekam, S. R. (1986). Belief and quantity: three-year-olds’ adaptation to listener's knowledge. Journal of Child Language 13, 305–315.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roid, G. H. (2003). Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales, 5th ed.Itsaca, IL: Riverside Publishing.Google Scholar
Rossnagel, C. (2000). Cognitive load and perspective taking: applying the automatic controlled distinction to verbal communication. European Journal of Social Psychology 30, 429–445.3.0.CO;2-V>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rutter, M., Bailey, A. & Lord, C. (2003). The Social Communication Questionnaire. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.Google Scholar
Sachs, J. & Devin, J. (1976). Young children's use of age-appropriate speech styles in social interaction and role-playing. Journal of Child Language 3, 81–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schuh, J. M., Mirman, D. & Eigsti, I. M. (2010). Perspective taking abilities in children with autism: the influence of working memory and theory of mind on shared knowledge. Paper presented at the 10th Annual International Meeting for Autism Research, May 2010, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
Semel, E. M., Wiig, E. H. & Secord, W. A. (2003). Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, Fourth Edition (CELF-4). San Antonio, TX: PsychCorp/Harcourt Assessment.Google Scholar
Speer, L. L., Cook, A. E., McMahon, W. M. & Clark, E. (2007). Face processing in children with autism: effects of stimulus contents and type. Autism 11, 265–277.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Suh, J., Eigsti, I. M., Naigles, L., Barton, M., Kelley, E. & Fein, D. (2014). Narrative performance of optimal outcome children and adolescents with a history of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 44(7), 1681–1694.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tager-Flusberg, H. (1995). ‘Once upon a ribbit’: stories narrated by autistic children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 13, 45–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tager-Flusberg, H., Paul, R. & Lord, C. E. (2005). Language and communication in autism. In Volkmar, F., Paul, R., Klin, A. & Cohen, D. J. (eds), Handbook of autism and pervasive developmental disorder (pp. 335–364). New York: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Volden, J. (2004). Conversational repair in speakers with autism spectrum disorder. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 39, 171–189.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Volden, J., Magill-Evans, J., Goulden, K. & Clarke, M. (2007). Varying language register according to listener needs in speakers with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 37, 1139–1154.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Volden, J. & Sorenson, A. (2009). Bossy and nice requests: varying language register in speakers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Journal of Communication Disorders 42, 58–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wallace, G. L., Case, L. K., Harms, M. B., Silvers, J. A., Kenworthy, L. & Martin, A. (2011). Diminished sensitivity to sad facial expressions in high functioning autism spectrum disorders is associated with symptomatology and adaptive functioning. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 41, 1475–1486.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ziatas, K., Durkin, K. & Pratt, C. (2003). Differences in assertive speech acts produced by children with autism, Asperger syndrome, specific language impairment, and normal development. Development and Psychopathology 15, 73–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed