Dr Vikki Janke from the Department of English Language & Linguistics will be giving a talk entitled ‘From Syntax to Pragmatics in High-Functioning Autism’ at UCL‘s Department of Developmental Science on Monday 24 March.
Vikki’s presentation will discuss a group of sentences called ‘control’ constructions. For some of these sentences, their interpretation is set by grammar – if a child’s grammar is developing in a typical way, we expect these ‘grammatically controlled’ constructions to follow a typical path of development. For the second type of these sentences, interpretation is set ‘pragmatically’ – that the context of the sentence is important – and so the child needs both an intact grammar and an intact pragmatics for them to develop.
The combination of grammatical and pragmatic prerequisites that characterises this group of constructions makes them an excellent means of distinguishing between problems with ‘complex grammar’ on the one hand and problems with ‘primary pragmatics’ on the other. Children with autism present with difficulties in many aspects of pragmatics, whilst exhibiting a more diverse grammatical profile. Vikki will discuss the results of three studies in which the development of the above constructions in a group of high-functioning children with autism is examined, using a sequence of picture-selection tasks. To anticipate, the children show mastery of the grammatically controlled constructions, and a development in line with that of TD, but initial analyses of their responses to ‘pragmatically controlled’ constructions suggest a pattern that is atypical.
For more information about the Department of Developmental Science at UCL, please see the website here: www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/research/dev-sci