Authors: Coralie Chevallier Deirdre Wilson Francesca Happé Ira Noveck
Publish Date: 2010/02/09
Volume: 40, Issue: 9, Pages: 1104-1117
Abstract
On being told “John or Mary will come” one might infer that not both of them will come Yet the semantics of “or” is compatible with a situation where both John and Mary come Inferences of this type which enrich the semantics of “or” from an ‘inclusive’ to an ‘exclusive’ interpretation have been extensively studied in linguistic pragmatics However the phenomenon has not been much explored in Autism Spectrum Disorders ASDs where pragmatic deficits are commonly reported Here we present an experiment investigating these inferences We predicted that as a result of the reported pragmatic deficits participants with ASD would produce fewer inferential enrichments of “or” than matched controls However contrary to expectations but in line with recent findings by Pijnacker et al Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 39 607–618 2009 performances did not differ across groups This unexpected finding is discussed in light of the literature on pragmatic abilities in autism
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