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. 2009 Feb;110(2):131-46.
doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.10.016. Epub 2008 Dec 25.

Reference production in young speakers with and without autism: effects of discourse status and processing constraints

Jennifer E Arnold  1 , Loisa Bennetto, Joshua J Diehl
Affiliations

Reference production in young speakers with and without autism: effects of discourse status and processing constraints

Jennifer E Arnold et al. Cognition. 2009 Feb.

Abstract

We examine the referential choices (pronouns/zeros vs. names/descriptions) made during a narrative by high-functioning children and adolescents with autism and a well-matched typically developing control group. The process of choosing appropriate referring expressions has been proposed to depend on two areas of cognitive functioning: (a) judging the attention and knowledge of one's interlocutor, and (b) the use of memory and attention mechanisms to represent the discourse situation. We predicted possible group differences, since autism is often associated with deficits in (a) mentalizing and (b) memory and attention, as well as a more general tendency to have difficulty with the pragmatic aspects of language use. Results revealed that some of the participants with autism were significantly less likely to produce pronouns or zeros in some discourse contexts. However, the difference was only one of degree. Overall, all participants in our analysis exhibited fine-grained sensitivity to the discourse context. Furthermore, referential choices for all participants were modulated by factors related to the cognitive effort of language production.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Percentage of references by discourse context, averaged by participant within each diagnostic/age group.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The average rate of pronoun use according to the recency of the last mention of the referent character.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Rate of pronoun use according to the grammatical function of the last mention of the referent, only including references in subject position and where the referent was also mentioned in the previous clause. Error bars represent standard error of the mean.
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