A Study On The Presupposition Comprehension Ability Of Chinese High-functioning Autistic Children

This study investigated the semantic presupposition comprehension ability and the acceptance of presupposition being cancelled in context in 7-9 year old Chinese high functioning children with autism.Based on the matching criteria of chronological age,verbal IQ,operational IQ and total IQ,this study selected 22 Chinese high functioning autistic child-ren and 22 typical developing children aged 7-9 years with IQ scores higher t-han 97.This research contains two experiments,One of the experiments was atruth judgment task,To investigate the semantic presupposition reasoning abilit-y of Chinese children with high functioning autism,and to investigate whether the children with high functioning autism have difficulties in reasoning presupposition based on sentence semantics,and whether there are differences in their performance of different presupposition triggers.Another experiment u-sed a five-point acceptability task from previous studies To explore the acceptability of presupposition of Chinese children with high functioning autism in context.Compared with typical developing children,whether there are difference-s in the acceptability of presupposition and predicate responses,and whether there are differences in the understanding of presupposition cancelled by different triggers.Finally,we compared whether there are differences in semantic and pragmatic presupposition understanding among Chinese high functioning autistic children.This study draws the following results and conclusions:First,the semantic presupposition comprehension of 7-9 year old Chinese high functioning children with autism was related to the complexity of the mental representation of the trigger language.Compared with the matching group of typical developing children,they performed worse on the trigger language w-ith complex mental representation and had difficulty in understanding the sema-ntic presupposition.However,most of the children were still able to infer the presupposition according to the semantic.Second,7-9 year old Chinese children with high functioning autism not only cannot accept the expression of presupposition being cancelled in the conte-xt,but also have a low acceptance of negative assertions.Their scores for all expressions of presupposition being cancelled were significantly lower than tho-se of the typical developing child matching group,and their scores for negativ-e assertions were also significantly lower than those of the typical developinghild matching group,and this psychological reality was reflected in each of the triggers.Thirdly,compared with semantic presupposition,the comprehension of prag-matic presupposition is more difficult for 7-9 year old Chinese children with high functioning autism.Even if they can accommodate the presupposition acco-rding to the semantics,they still cannot accept the expression that the presupp-osition is cancelled due to their own rigidity.Their cognition lacks flexibility and can’t adjust information to context changes.