Are Children with Autism Deaf to Gricean Maxims?

TLDR

High‑functioning children with autism exhibit a severe deficit in pragmatics while their syntax and morphology remain intact. The study compared autistic children with children with specific language impairment and typically developing peers to investigate selective communication impairment and discuss implications for domain‑specific cognitive development. The authors employed a pragmatic task requiring detection of utterances violating conversational maxims such as redundancy, informativeness, truthfulness, relevance, and politeness. Autistic children performed at chance on the pragmatic task, unlike SLI and control children who performed above chance; their success correlated with false‑belief attribution, supporting that autism’s communication deficits stem from a selective impairment in representing propositional attitudes.

Abstract

Department of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK High-functioning children with autism show a severe deficit in the development of pragmatics whereas their knowledge of syntax and morphology is relatively intact. In this study we investigated further their selective communication impairment by comparing them with children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing children. We used a pragmatic task that involved the detection of utterances that violate conversational maxims (avoid redundancy, be informative, truthful, relevant, and polite). Most children with autism performed at chance on this task, whereas all children with SLI and all normal controls performed above chance. In addition, the success of children with autism on the pragmatics task was related to their ability to attribute false beliefs. These results are consistent with the idea that communication deficits in autism result from a selective impairment in representing propositional attitudes. Their implications for domain-specific views of cognitive development are discussed.