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Pragmatic Abilities In Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Follow-Up Study, Jessica Devilliers, Brooke Myers, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

Our guiding question, here and in two prior papers, is: Are some pragmatic tasks more difficult than others for people diagnosed with ASDs? For instance, it has been tentatively suggested by Happé (1995) that understanding irony is more difficult for ASD speakers than understanding metaphor is. Or again, our 2007 paper urged, on the basis of corpus examples, that while speakers with ASDs show difficulties with “figurative language” generally – metaphor, irony, conversational implicature (Dennis et al. 2001; Gold et al. 2010; Happé 1995; MacKay & Shaw, 2004) – they are relatively proficient with pragmatic determinants of literal speech act …