Elephants in Pyjamas: Testing the Weak Central Coherence Account of Autism Spectrum Disorders Using a Syntactic Disambiguation Task.

Riches et al. (2016) asked teens to read tricky sentences. One sentence said, “The elephants in pajamas washed the keeper.”

The team timed how fast kids with and without autism picked the silly meaning. They wanted to see if autism makes people miss the big picture.

Both groups spotted the joke just as fast. Kids with autism did not lag behind.

The result says weak central coherence is not showing up in teen language tasks.

Kaland et al. (2007) ran a near-copy test years earlier. They used picture puzzles, not sentences, and also found no ASD speed edge. Together the two papers form a clean replication across verbal and visuo-spatial jobs.

Ferraro (2016) crunched 32 studies and found no general reaction-time slowing in autism. That meta-score backs the new null RT result.

Koh et al. (2012) looks like a clash at first. They saw stronger field-independence in English kids with autism, a sign of weak coherence. But the same team found no effect in Singaporean kids. Culture, not autism, drove the difference. So the papers do not truly disagree; they show the effect vanishes outside Western samples.

Stop blaming slow or odd answers on weak central coherence. If a teen with autism hesitates on language tasks, look at vocabulary, syntax, or motivation instead. Use clear sentences, not extra context cues, to boost understanding.