How Autism and Sex Influence Perspective-Taking in Pragmatic Inferences

Despite difficulties with pragmatic inferences which require perspective-taking, autistic individuals often perform similarly to non-autistic peers on scalar implicatures tasks. Prior studies often used artificial tasks lacking a rich communicative context, or clear interlocutor, potentially misrepresenting autistic performance. They have also underrepresented females, who may outperform males on pragmatic measures. This study aims to address both limitations.

52 autistic and 52 non-autistic adults (balanced for sex) completed an implicature priming task with both lexical (e.g. interpreting "John ate some of the cookies" as "some but not all") and ad-hoc scalar implicatures (e.g., "the bowl with an apple" meaning "only an apple" when another bowl contains an apple and an orange). This task was an online card-selection game with clues either provided by a cooperative and knowledgeable "interlocutor" or simply appearing on the screen.

Reliable priming effects occurred across groups and implicature types, showing that autistic adults, like non-autistic adults, flexibly interpret scalar terms in context. Speaker presence interacted with sex: while autistic males made fewer implicatures in the speaker-present condition, autistic females, like non-autistic participants, made more implicatures; they nonetheless showed longer reaction times.

Communicative context and sex both shape pragmatic performance in autism. Autistic females may reach similar interpretations to non-autistic people by using effortful compensatory strategies, whereas autistic males may be more affected by the extra demands of reasoning about a speaker's mental states and intentions. The findings underscore the value of realistic, inclusive designs in pragmatic research and looking at the sexes separately.