A Study On The Scalar Reasoning Ability Of Chinese High-functioning Autistic Children

The current study is aimed to fully investigate the ability of deriving scalar inferences in Chinese high-functioning autistic children, explore the difficulties they may meet in deriving scalar inferences of different lexical scales, and analyze the underlying causes of their failure to derive scalar inferences in the angle of the semantic links of the stronger and weaker scalar alternatives.Therefore, our research respectively selected 25 Chinese high-functioning autistic children and 25 typically developing children as the experimental task subjects of quantifier "some", who were matched by chronological age, verbal IQ, performance IQ, total IQ and vocabulary, and were belonged to 5-year-old age group and 6-year-old age group relatively according to their chronological age, in order to explore the ability of deriving scalar inferences in Chinese high-functioning autistic children of different ages and explore the effects of context which supported the scalar inferences. Experimental results showed that no matter high-functioning autistic children in 5-year-old age group, high-functioning autistic children in 6-year-old age group or the whole high-functioning autistic children produced lower rates of scalar inferences of "some" without the support of the context, compared to the matched typically developing children. In the angle of the longitudinal age, high-functioning autistic children in 5-year-old age group and 6-year-old age group produced similar rates of scalar inferences, while the typically developing children in the 6-year-old age group produced higher rates of scalar inferences than those in 5-year-old age group, which showed that the ability of deriving scalar inferences in typically developing children was growing with the age, this meant that the high-functioning autistic children may have defects in deriving inferences. By comparing the results of the total 10 statements and those of the first three statements, we found that the rates of producing scalar inferences in the typically developing children became higher through the repeated appearances of the stronger and weaker scalar alternatives, which helped establish the semantic links of stronger and weaker scalar alternatives, but the rates produced by high-functioning autistic children kept the same. This indicated that the knowledge of stronger and weaker scalar alternatives and their semantic links might be the key factor of deriving scalar inferences. Because individuals with autism might have abnormal semantic representation, which hinder establishing the semantic links of stronger and weaker scalar alternatives, thus preventing deriving scalar inferences. Two groups of subjects were able to promote the rates of scalar inferences with the support of context, the context could prompt enhancing the semantic links of scalar alternatives, thus facilitating the subjects deriving scalar inferences.Secondly, our research respectively selected 15 Chinese high-functioning autism and 15 matched typically developing children in 6-8 years old as the experimental task subjects of modal term "might" and mental verb "think", who were matched by the same standard of the task of quantifier "some". We created the situation with possibility, then explored whether the subjects could refuse the statements using the weaker term when the stronger term was applied. The results were compared with those of the task of quantifiers, in order to compare high-functioning autistic children’s ability to derive scalar inferences in three different lexical scales. Experimental results showed that high-functioning autistic children produced the similar rates of scalar inferences compared to typically developing children, and all of the subjects performed worse in the task of modal term and mental verb than in the task of quantifier, which showed that the rates of deriving scalar inferences in different lexical scales were different for children, and the age for children to acquire calculating the scalar inferences of different types of lexical scales was different either. The semantic complexities, word frequencies, semantic relatedness, and the semantic distance and boundaries were factors that affected the establishment of stronger and weaker scalar alternatives’ semantic links. While high-functioning autistic children performed similar to the typically developing children in the task of modal term and mental verb, this didn’t meant that they had the normal functional pragmatic competence. Because of the abnormal semantic representation, high-functioning autistic children might meet difficulties in calculating the scalar inferences since the semantic links are difficult to establish, while typically developing children’s abilities to derive inferences would become better with the age growing.