Pragmatic Ability In Children With Autism:the Correlations Between Mind-reading And Conversational Perspective-taking

Language and social communication disorders are the significant symptoms in children with autism.Compared with typically developing children,autistic children have deficits in language development and communicative ability.It is of great clinical and social significance to conduct the research on the language functions of autistic children.In the research on the verbal communicative functions of autistic children,research involving pragmatic disorders has received much attention,the focus of research is to figure out whether children with autism could understand other people's intentions or not.The relationship between the development of pragmatic ability and mind-reading ability constitutes an important issue in the research on the verbal communication of autistic children,while related research is slightly lagging behind in China.The investigation of the pragmatic ability in this thesis was restricted to the core concept conversational perspective-taking.Through exploring the correlations between conversational perspective-taking and mind-reading ability,this thesis aimed to provide beneficial references for the research on autistic children's verbal communicative ability.Speech acts,background information and cooperative principle are the three dimensions of pragmatic ability involving conversational perspective-taking.The thesis took eight autistic children in some aid organization in Kunming and an equal number of typically developing children as subjects,adopted Chinese Communicative Development Inventory,Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised,mind-reading tasks and conversational perspective-taking tasks to conduct research on the verbal communicative ability of autistic children and typically developing children,and then the following results were obtained:First,through the regression analysis of the autistic children's performances on pragmatic tasks and mind-reading tasks,it showed that pragmatic ability had a positive effect on mind-reading tasks.Second,the three specific aspects of pragmatic ability were forced into the regression analysis,the results showed that mind-reading ability and pragmatic ability are correlated;after making further analysis of therelationship between mind-reading ability and each aspect of pragmatic ability,it came to the results: Due to the influence of executive function,background information tasks were difficult for most autistic children.As for cooperative principle,testees seldom violated cooperative principle.Because the children recruited in the research were very young,it was possible that the children occasionally might make irrelevant utterances accidentally.Meanwhile,the test results showed that speech act was most relevant to mind-reading ability.At last,after making a comparison between autistic children and typically developing children,it came to the conclusion that the performances of autistic children on mind-reading tasks and pragmatic tasks were worse than those of typically developing children.For autistic children,deficiency in pragmatic ability was also one of the important factors causing the difficulty in social communication.On basis of the above research results,the thesis discussed the implications of the research results by combining theory and practice in order to provide some references for the follow-up research and the assessment of the language ability of autistic children at home.