Making Inferences: Comprehension of Physical Causality, Intentionality, and Emotions in Discourse by High-Functioning Older Children, Adolescents, and Adults with Autism.

Austin et al. (2015) asked high-functioning people with autism to read short stories. The stories tested three kinds of inferences: physical cause-and-effect, people's intentions, and hidden emotions.

Participants ranged from kids to adults. The team compared their answers to a typically developing group.

The autism group scored lower on every inference type. Emotional inferences were the hardest gap.

The authors think the learners lacked real-world experience with feelings, or the words to talk about them.

Richman et al. (2001) saw the same pattern fourteen years earlier: fluent speech did not protect autistic kids from pragmatic failures. E et al. simply widened the age range and added emotional and physical items.

Petit et al. (2025) complicates the story. They found autistic kids failed on quick, in-the-moment inferences (scalar implicatures) yet understood metaphors just fine. The new work supersedes E et al. by showing not all pragmatic skills break down together.

Congiu et al. (2010) seems to disagree on physical causality. Their older autistic students judged physical cause-and-effect like peers, while E et al. reported deficits. The gap vanishes when you notice age: older learners may catch up, so target physical causality early.

Check which inference type your learner misses. If they fail emotional questions, build feeling vocabulary and shared experiences first. If they stumble on physical chains, use step-by-step cause lessons. Do not assume one inference deficit means they are weak at all of them. Probe, then teach the specific gap.