Social and Behavioral Sciences | Open Access Articles

Revisiting Pragmatics Abilities In Autism Spectrum Disorders, Jessica De Villiers, Brooke Myers, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

In a 2007 paper, we argued that speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) exhibit pragmatic abilities which are surprising given the usual understanding of communication in that group. That is, it is commonly reported that people diagnosed with an ASD have trouble with metaphor, irony, conversational implicature and other non-literal language. This is not a matter of trouble with knowledge and application of rules of grammar. The difficulties lie, rather, in successful communicative interaction. Though we did find pragmatic errors within literal talk, the transcribed conversations we studied showed many, many successes. A second paper reinforced our finding of a …

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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 …

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