A diminished propensity to compute scalar implicatures is linked to autistic traits

What is it about?

Pragmatic skills of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are generally considered impaired due to their difficulties with Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e. the ability of reading other people’s intentions, beliefs and knowledge. In the pragmatic literature there is an important debate on the role of ToM abilities in pragmatic computation, particularly in the derivation of scalar implicatures (i.e., implicatures like ‘Some linguists are smart’ interpreted pragmatically as ‘Some but not all linguists are smart’). The goal of the present study was to look more in depth at the role of epistemic reasoning in scalar implicature computation. By means of two Sentence Evaluation tasks we investigated the degree of acceptance of categorical underinformative sentences like ‘Some dogs are animals’, in which the quantifier ‘some’ can be interpreted logically as ‘some and possibly all’ or pragmatically ad ‘some but not all’. Moreover, we assessed participants’ autistic traits using the Autism- Spectrum Quotient questionnaire. Building on previous research that showed how a) people in the autistic spectrum has strong ‘folk physics’ abilities (i.e., inferring the physical causes of natural events) compared to typical population, b) students enrolled in scientific curricula have more biological relatives with ASD compared to students in the Humanities and c) scientists score higher on autistic traits compared to students of Humanities, we decided to assess students enrolled either in a Science or a Humanities curriculum. We found that in both experiments students enrolled in Science curricula provided less pragmatic answers compared to students enrolled in Humanities curricula. Moreover, autistic traits predicted the number of pragmatic answers; more specifically, ToM traits seem to be related with the number of pragmatic answers. In conclusion, it seems that a certain inter-individual variability based on autistic traits might explain a more logical behavior of ASD subjects than typical adults when evaluating the pragmatic felicity of underinformative sentences.

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Why is it important?

One problem about studies on population with Autistic Spectrum Disorders is the limited number of participants. We aimed at assessing pragmatic abilities with a higher number of participants; this is why we used previous literature on autistic traits to select a group of adults that might have more autistic traits than typical population. Moreover, we demonstrated that specific autistic traits might explain pragmatic behaviours.

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