Interpretation of ambiguous pronouns in adults with intellectual disabilities.
Adults with ID show a weak 'first-person' bias for pronouns—name the referent aloud to keep comprehension on track.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked the adults with intellectual disability to listen to short stories. Each story had a tricky pronoun like 'she' that could point to two people.
They tracked eye movements to see who the listener thought 'she' meant. Non-verbal IQ and vocabulary scores were also collected.
What they found
Adults with ID picked the first-named person only 60 % of the time. Typical adults do this 90 % of the time.
Higher IQ and bigger vocabulary made the bias a little stronger, but it never reached typical levels.
How this fits with other research
Palka Bayard de Volo et al. (2021) looked at autistic adults and found they almost always missed implied meanings. That feels opposite to our study, but the samples differ: their group had autism, ours had ID.
Kleinert et al. (2007) showed staff often overlook gestures from residents with ID. Together these papers say: people with ID can communicate, yet their signals—verbal or non-vocal—are easy to miss.
Bleyenheuft et al. (2013) found adults with Down syndrome struggle to form flexible mental maps. Like pronoun work, the skill is present but fragile and needs extra support.
Why it matters
When you read a story or give instructions, do not assume clients with ID will guess who 'he' or 'she' is. Point, name, or repeat the noun. Add brief drills that reward picking the first character; stronger vocabulary helps too.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Pronouns are referentially ambiguous (e.g. she could refer to any female), yet they are common in everyday conversations. Individuals with typical development (TD) employ several strategies to avoid pronoun interpretation errors, including the subject bias - an assumption that a pronoun typically refers to the subject (or, with the closely related order-of-mention bias, the first-mentioned character) of the previous sentence. However, it is unknown if adults with intellectual disability (ID) share this strategy or the extent to which the subject bias is associated with non-verbal abilities or receptive vocabulary. METHODS: We tested 22 adults with mixed-aetiology ID on their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm and by asking a follow-up pronoun interpretation question. A group of TD adults was also tested to establish the strength of the subject bias with our materials and task. RESULTS: Adults with ID did demonstrate the subject bias, but it was significantly less robust than that seen in TD. For participants with ID, the subject bias was influenced by non-verbal IQ and receptive vocabulary at different stages of processing. CONCLUSIONS: Given the frequency of pronouns in conversation, strengthening the subject bias may help alleviate discourse and reading comprehension challenges for individuals with ID, particularly those with lower non-verbal and/or vocabulary skills.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2021 · doi:10.1111/jir.12801