Work

Performance of autistic adults on conversational implicatures: A comparison of material and behavioural inferences

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: • Much communication relies on implicit meaning, which is often claimed to be difficult for autistic people due to theory of mind demands. • Implicit messages (implicatures) come in two types, material and behavioural, and only behavioural relies heavily on theory of mind. • We tested autistic and neurotypical participants on both types of implicature, expecting autistic participants to perform differently on behavioural implicature when compared to material implicatures, and when compared to neurotypical participants. • We found that autistic participants performed very similarly to neurotypical participants, both groups finding behavioural implicatures slightly more difficult. • We speculate that the reported difficulties that autistic people have with implicit communication may be due to the demands of real-time interaction, rather than underlying issues of inferential competence. This paper compares the performance of autistic and neurotypical participants in discourse-completion tasks that require the identification of two types of particularised conversational implicature. Material implicatures are those in which the inferential relationship from what is said to the implicature can be reconstructed without recourse to descriptions of the speaker's behaviour and the reasons underlying it, while behavioural implicatures do require such descriptions. We hypothesised that autistic participants would perform on a par with neurotypical participants in the material cases, but less well than neurotypicals in the behavioural cases, given that the latter make greater demands on theory of mind. In fact, we found that autistic participants’ performance mirrored that of neurotypicals in both conditions. We note a general tendency in the literature for autistic individuals to perform well on tests of comprehending implicit communication, in contrast to attested and self-reported difficulties in this area. We speculate that this mismatch might be explained in terms of a difference in underlying competence and the performance demands of real-world interactions.

Source: Journal of Communication Disorders

DOI: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2025.106509

Authors: Mark Jary, Isabel Martín-González, Agustín Vicente, Elena Castroviejo

Institutions: University of the Basque Country, Ikerbasque

Language: English

Topic: Autism Spectrum Disorder Research

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,960

Funders: Eusko Jaurlaritza, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación