Pragmatic language dysfunction in autism: Referential communication and perspective-taking in autistic speaker

Pragmatic language skills have been identified as one frequently dysfunctional domain in autistic speakers. The current investigations were undertaken first, to establish the nature of the relationship between referential communication skill and the ability to assess and assume another person's conceptual viewpoint. The second purpose was to determine whether anticipated performance difficulties could be ameliorated by application of a brief, but directive, prompt and subsequently whether improved performance would generalize to a similar situation employing novel stimuli. Together these data were used to comment on the recently proposed "theory of mind" hypothesis as the root of autism's social and communicative dysfunction. A secondary purpose was to examine qualitative differences that emerge in the spontaneous language of autistic speakers and that could not easily be accounted for by a specific cognitive deficit in metarepresentation.;In the first study, ten high functioning autistic adolescents and young adults were matched for age, sex, and language skill to normally developing subjects, and presented with both referential communication and perspective taking tasks. A definitive relationship between referential communication and perspective taking skills could not be established due to unexpectedly high performance on the perspective taking task within the autistic group. Also contrary to expectations, there were no significant differences in performance on either task between the groups.;The second study was directed toward an examination of whether or not performance could be improved by the administration of a prompt, and whether anticipated improvements would persist in a generalization condition. Significantly improved performance occurred following administration of the prompt and was maintained in the generalization condition. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that difficulties in referential communication, and thus in the expression of presuppositional pragmatic competence, may not be fundamentally accounted for by disturbances in the autistic speaker's development of a "theory of mind".;In addition, given at least relatively intact perspective taking skill, the autistic speakers still displayed significant difficulties in a variety of pragmatic, syntactic and semantic language behaviours. Their presence serves to buttress the argument against a developmental deficiency in metarepresentation as the primary source of autism's communicative dysfunction.