Pilot Evaluation of a New Computerized Test for Pragmatic Inferences in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Aged 8-12 Years Old

By virtue of pragmatic inference-making, a listener can go above and beyond the linguistic meaning of the speaker's utterance in order to understand what the speaker intended to communicate. Such inferences allow the listener to understand inter alia irony, metaphor, indirect requests, scalar and ad-hoc implicatures. Autistic individuals have typically been described, by clinicians and language specialists, as tending towards having a literal understanding of language and as being deficient with respect to understanding a speaker's intended meaning, and these difficulties have a major impact on quality of life and social participation. Therefore, assessing these abilities seems essential, both for diagnosis purpose and to draw a clear description of an individual's functioning profile. Yet, no tool is available for children aged 8 to 12 in French. A new test named TIPi has been developed to resolve this issue. This new test is computerized and runs in a touch pad. The main goal of the present study is to evaluate the ability of the TIPi to discriminate autism spectrum disorders (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) children from typically developing (TD) children. Secondary goals are (i) to measure the typical development of these abilities in TD children in this age range, (ii) to assess the developmental link these skills might have with other cognitive of language abilities (mentalizing, cognitive flexibility, core language skills, central coherence), and (iii) to compare the pragmatic profile of ASD children with another neurodevelopmental condition: developmental language disorder, in order to test the relevance of this test for differential diagnosis.