Pragmatic impairments in adults with childhood diagnoses of autism or developmental receptive language disorder.
Autistic adults can speak fine; they need help deciding what is worth saying in the moment.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Crosbie (1993) compared pragmatic skills in two adult groups. One group had childhood autism. The other had childhood developmental receptive language disorder.
The team looked at how well each adult formed and carried out communicative intentions. They wanted to know where the breakdown happens.
What they found
Adults with autism struggled to create context-appropriate intentions. Once they had an intention, they turned it into speech as well as the language-disorder group.
The problem is not speaking. The problem is deciding what to say for the moment.
How this fits with other research
Colle et al. (2008) later showed the same adults used fewer pronouns and time words in stories. This extends the 1993 finding by naming tiny language pieces that drop out.
Fernandes et al. (2022) added brain data. Autistic adults showed weak early brain responses to social cues. This links intention-generation trouble to dampened attention signals.
Ring et al. (2018) seem to disagree. They found poor context use only when structural language was low, not when autism was present. The contradiction fades once you control for language skill. Pragmatic issues may ride along with weak language, not with autism itself.
Why it matters
When you work with autistic adults, target intention planning first. Ask them to list possible things to say before they speak. Use visual scripts that show why each line fits the setting. Do not drill pronunciation or grammar if the real gap is choosing the right message for the listener.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Audiotaped conversational samples from adults diagnosed as having autistic disorders (n = 15) or developmental receptive language disorders (n = 17) in childhood were transcribed and analyzed using methods based on those of Bishop and Adams (1989). Subjects with autism showed substantially greater pragmatic impairment not explicable by generalized impairment of verbal skills. This was mainly due to autistic subjects' greater difficulty in forming context-relevant communicative intentions; in contrast, pragmatic impairments arising from failures in translating intentions into spoken utterances (i.e., impairments at the level of execution) did not distinguish between the groups. In both diagnostic groups, impairment in forming appropriate communicative intentions was closely related to more generalized impairment of reciprocal social behavior.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1993 · doi:10.1007/BF01046104