Communicative abilities in autism: evidence for attentional deficits

Although there are many theories about autism, something all of them agree upon is that autistics are impaired in the ability to communicate. The explanation is either their incapacity to attribute mental states to others or the interference of irrelevant stimuli with the access and processing of the communication (low). Our study on mute autistic children aims to investigate their communicative ability in order to bring some new evidence on the debate. We used an experimental technique that allows autistic children to access and process the communicative acts in a familiar context for as long as needed. The experimental results show that our sample of autistic children performs as well as the control group of normal children in dealing with directs, indirects, ironies, deceits, and recoveries of failure. Independent of their respective difficulty, the felicitous outcome of any of these acts requires the capacity to attribute an adequate communicative intention to the actor. Moreover, our results show that, contrary to the established findings in the literature, autistics' performance in the standard false belief task, a task that requires one to understand the mental states of other people, is equivalent to the performance of normal subjects. We argue that an attentional deficit affects the communicative performance of autistics in experiments where classic methodologies are used; with the proper methodology, we can access the unexplored world where mute autistic children also communicate. As far as we know, this is the first systematic experiment on pragmatic abilities in mute autistic children. Indeed, our work shows that tests and methodologies which help to focus on the communicative task improve the autistics' performance with respect to those used in the literature. We conclude that the autistic communicative deficit is at the performance level and that it has an attentional nature.