2019.04.17 Dr. Candice Cheung

Assistant Professor

Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience

Dept. of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong

Profile

Comprehension of presuppositions in Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Utterances often involve presupposed or backgrounded information which is mutually known or assumed by both speaker and addressee. For instance, an utterance such as ‘My brother likes swimming’ presupposes that the speaker has a brother. While an enormous amount of research has suggested that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have communication difficulties, little is known about their performance on presuppositions, a domain of knowledge which is crucial for successful communication. In this talk, I report the findings from our study on the comprehension of presuppositions in Cantonese-speaking children with ASD and their typically developing (TD) peers.

In our study, 27 Cantonese-speaking children with ASD (mean age 9.07) were compared to 23 TD children matched on chronological age (CA) and 21 TD children matched on language ability (LA). Knowledge of presuppositions was evaluated on the basis of children’s ability to judge whether a given utterance was a correct presupposition of a preceding utterance. Children with ASD were found to perform significantly worse than CA-matched TD children in comprehending presuppositions, but they performed similarly to LA-matched TD children. After controlling for the effects of chronological age, language ability, and non-verbal intelligence, children with ASD were still found to show a deficit in comprehending the presupposition triggered by a temporal clause relative to the two groups of TD children. These findings suggested that children with ASD were impaired in comprehending temporal clauses, which might be attributed to their difficulty in understanding temporal concepts such as past and future.