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Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (102)
Autistic adults are often perceived as having an atypical speech. The acoustic characteristics of these impressions prove surprisingly difficult to delineate, but one feature that does robustly emerge across different studies is higher pitch (F0 values) in autistic versus neurotypical individuals. However, there is no clear explanation why autistic...
Some autistic children acquire foreign languages from exposure to screens. Such unexpected bilingualism (UB) is therefore not driven by social interaction, rather, language acquisition appears to rely on less socially mediated learning and other cognitive processes. We hypothesize that UB children may rely on other cues, such as acoustic cues, of t...
While, by default, people tend to believe communicated content, it is also possible that they become more vigilant when personal stakes increase. A lab ( N = 72) and an online ( N = 284) experiment show that people make judgements affected by explicitly tagged false information and that they misremember such information as true – a phenomenon dubbe...
Purpose
Predictive coding theories posit that autism is characterized by an over-adjustment to prediction errors, resulting in frequent updates of prior beliefs. Atypical weighting of prediction errors is generally considered to negatively impact the construction of stable models of the world, but may also yield beneficial effects. In a novel assoc...
Social attention is reported to be crucial for the development of social skills, and, according to the social cognitive developmental theory, is fostered by social interactions. Autism is of central importance to the study of social attention, as autism is characterized by atypical social interactions and low social attention, both linked according...
Background
Face scanning studies in autistic children report mixed results as to attention allocated to the eyes and mouth regions. While face scanning is a dynamic process, the way autistic children distribute their attention between the eyes and mouth of their interlocutor is usually analyzed by averaging the proportion of time spent looking eith...
Language profiles in autism are variable and atypical, with frequent speech onset delays, but also, in some cases, unusually steep growth of structural language skills. Joint attention is often seen as a major predictor of language in autism, even though low joint attention is a core characteristic of autism, independent of language levels. In this...
In this study, we report an extensive investigation of the structural language and acoustical specificities of the spontaneous speech of ten three- to five-year-old verbal autistic children. The autistic children were compared to a group of ten typically developing children matched pairwise on chronological age, nonverbal IQ and socioeconomic statu...
Purpose:
Our study addresses three main questions: (a) Do autistics and neurotypicals produce different patterns of disfluencies, depending on the experimenter's direct versus averted gaze? (b) Are these patterns correlated to gender, skin conductance responses, fixations on the experimenter's face, alexithymia, or social anxiety scores? Lastly, (...
A highly emblematic paradigm in experimental pragmatics consists in presenting participants with an existentially quantified sentence of the form Some X are Y in a context in which all X are obviously Y. Participants who reject such sentences as false or infelicitous are said to adopt a 'pragmatic' instead of a 'logical' reading of some, and to der...
This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and l...
Many autistics report being distressed by eye contact, but eye-tracking studies suggest that eye contact is associated with hypo-arousal rather than hyper-arousal in autism. Within a live face-to-face paradigm combining a wearable eye-tracker with electrodermal activity sensors, 80 adults (40 autistics) defined words in front of an experimenter eit...
Previous studies have shown that people are truth-biased in that they tend to believe the information they receive, even if it is clearly flagged as false. The truth bias has been recently proposed to be an instance of meta-cognitive myopia, that is, of a generalized human insensitivity towards the quality and correctness of the information availab...
In many autistic children, speech onset is delayed and expressive language emerges after 3 years of age. We qualitatively and quantitatively describe oral productions of autistic preschoolers, including many non- or minimally speaking, recorded during interactions with a caregiver and with an experimenter. Data clustering on manually coded oral pro...
Background
In the spring of 2020, Belgian authorities enforced a full lockdown period to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This lockdown drastically disrupted the daily life of autistic individuals’ and that of their families. In the midst of these extraordinary circumstances, we assessed the impact of social restrictions on autistic indi...
Whereas a reduced tendency to follow pointing gestures is described as an early sign of autism, the literature on response to joint attention indicates that autistic children perform better when a point is added to other social cues such as eye gaze. The purpose of this study was to explore pointing processing in autism when it is the only availabl...
Low integration of speech sounds with the mouth movements likely contributes to language acquisition disabilities that frequently characterize young autistic children. However, the existing empirical evidence either relies on complex verbal instructions or merely focuses on preferential gaze on in-synch videos. The former method is clearly unadapte...
Background: Studies on impression formation in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have suggested that both ASD and neurotypical (NT) individuals extract paralinguistic cues (e.g., vocal and facial expressions) from brief extracts of social behaviors to form less favorable impressions of the personality traits of ASD individuals than of their NT peers....
Discourse studies investigating differences in the socio-communicative profiles of autistic (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) individuals have mostly relied on orthographic transcriptions, without taking prosodic information into account. However, atypical prosody is ubiquitous in ASD and a more accurate representation of their discourse abilities should...
This study examined whether the atypical speech style that is frequently reported in autistic adults is underpinned by an inflexible production of phonetic targets. In a first task, 20 male autistic adults and 20 neuro‐typicals had to read and produce native vowels. To assess the extent to which phonetic inflexibility is due to an overall fine‐grai...
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often associated with impaired perspective-taking skills. Deception is an important indicator of perspective-taking, and therefore may be thought to pose difficulties to people with ASD (e.g., Baron-Cohen in J Child Psychol Psychiatry 3:1141–1155, 1992). To test this hypothesis, we asked participants with and witho...
Background: With the overarching objective to gain better insights into social attention in autistic adults, the present study addresses three outstanding issues about face processing in autism. First, do autistic adults display a preference for mouths over eyes; second, do they avoid direct gaze; third, is atypical visual exploration of faces in a...
Under the standard Lewis–Stalnaker view, accommodation is a pragmatic solution to a coordination problem. Accommodation processes are triggered when a speaker uses an expression that requires that the conversational background contain some hitherto unmentioned information. Accommodation, then, is not automatic; it is a process addressees engage in...
While narrative competence has been well documented in autistic children and young adolescents, fairly little is known about narrative performance of autistic adults. However, narrative abilities continue to develop well into adulthood. Hence, the main objective of the present study is to provide a clearer linguistic and communicative profile of AS...
The purpose of this study was to explore whether children with autism display selectivity in social learning. We investigated the processing of word mappings provided by speakers who differed on previously demonstrated accuracy and on potential degree of reliability in three groups of children (children with autism spectrum disorder, children with...
The main points to be developed in this chapter are the following:
• Pragmatic competence is not a homogeneous thing, but manifests itself in the ability to deal with a broad variety of tasks, including disambiguation, establishing coherence, interpreting metaphors, and much more.
• Pragmatic deficiencies observed in people with autism are not eq...
Relevance, Pragmatics and Interpretation - edited by Kate Scott July 2019
Background: Children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show a tendency to preferentially rely on those referential descriptions that have previously been used by their conversational partner. However, such a tendency may become maladaptive in a situation of interaction with different partners who may introduce alternative lexical descr...
Background: Increasing attention is being paid to the higher prevalence of boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and to the implications of this ratio discrepancy on our understanding of autism in girls. One recent avenue of research has focused on caregiver’s concern, suggesting that autism might present differently in boys and girls. One unexp...
Recent research has reported superior socio-communicative skills in bilingual children. We examined the hypothesis of a bilingual pragmatic advantage by testing bilingual, bi-dialectal and monolingual children on the comprehension and processing of various pragmatic meanings: relevance, scalar, contrastive, manner implicatures, novel metaphors and...
Recent research has reported superior socio-communicative skills in bilingual children. We examined the hypothesis of a bilingual pragmatic advantage by testing bilingual, bi-dialectal and monolingual children on the comprehension and processing of various pragmatic meanings: relevance, scalar, contrastive, manner implicatures, novel metaphors and...
Subjective impressions of speech delivery in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as monotonic or over-precise are widespread but still lack robust acoustic evidence. This study provides a detailed acoustic characterization of the specificities of speech in individuals with ASD using an extensive sample of speech data, from the production of narratives a...
Pragmatic deficits constitute a central feature of autism, which is highly relevant to Jaswal & Akhtar's criticisms of the social motivation theory of autism. Recent research reveals that while certain context-based interpretations are accessible, more complex pragmatic phenomena remain challenging for people on the spectrum. Such a selective pragm...
An ongoing debate in the literature on language acquisition is whether preschool children process reference in an egocentric way or whether they spontaneously and by-default take their partner’s perspective into account. The reported study implements a computerized referential task with a controlled trial presentation and simple verbal instructions...
We conducted a web-based study investigating whether the probability of deriving four types of pragmatic inferences depends on the degree to which one has traits associated with the autism spectrum, as measured by the autism spectrum quotient test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001). In line with previous research, we show...
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often described as being characterised by a uniform pragmatic impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that some areas of pragmatic functioning are preserved. This study seeks to determine to which extent context-based derivation of non-linguistically encoded meaning is functional in ASD. We compare the perfor...
We have documented the significant presence of spontaneous and productive use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the speech of five Tunisian boys with autism, an unusual phenomenon. In typical development, MSA is not fully acquired before the late school years. The Arabic language in Tunisia is in a state of diglossia, and (unlike the colloquial Tu...
We propose that attraction errors in agreement production (e.g., the key to the cabinets are missing) are related to two components of executive control: working memory and inhibitory control. We tested 138 children aged 10 to 12, an age when children are expected to produce high rates of errors. To increase the potential of individual variation in...
Truth bias is the tendency to believe information whether or not it is true. According to a prominent account, this tendency results from limited cognitive resources. We presented participants true and false statements organized in coherent narratives, and distracted half of the participants while they processed the statements. Our findings suggest...
There has been substantial debate about the question of whether 'some' is normally interpreted as 'some but not all' when it is embedded under a quantifying expression. Experiments using a sentence-picture verification paradigm have been equivocal: while Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009) report that embedded upper-bounded construals of 'some' are almos...
Prior research suggests an egocentric bias in the ability to adopt a third-person perspective in sarcastic statements. However, it remains unclear whether (1) this bias is genuinely due to egocentric anchoring or to the cost of the activation of the sarcastic interpretation; (2) context-based, allocentric processing of sarcasm can be by-passed by c...
According to the literalist view of speech acts, morpho-syntactic sentence types are associated directly at the semantic level with an illocutionary force. By contrast, according to contextualist theories illocutionary force emerges from contexts of use. To date, however, there is little experimental evidence relevant to this debate. We propose two...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by primary pragmatic difficulties, out of step with verbal and non-verbal developmental level. This selective survey paper addresses three recent domains of research on pragmatic functions in autism. First, we provide an up-to-date discussion of how lack of sensitivity to social cues impacts early acq...
The term “pragmatics” is often used to refer without distinction, on one hand, to the contextual selection of interpretation norms and, on the other hand, to the context-sensitive processes guided by these norms. Pragmatics in the first acception depends on language-independent contextual factors that can, but need not, involve Theory of Mind; in t...
The imperative should be thought of as a comparative concept, defined as a sentence type whose only prototypical function is the performance of the whole range of directive speech acts. Furthermore, for a non-second-person form to count as an imperative it must be homogeneous with the second-person form, thereby allowing true imperative paradigms t...
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are often said to present a global pragmatic impairment. However, there is some observational evidence that context-based comprehension of indirect requests may be preserved in autism. In order to provide experimental confirmation to this hypothesis, indirect speech act comprehension was tested in a group of 1...
There is growing evidence that sleep plays a pivotal role on health, cognition and emotional regulation. However, the interplay between sleep and social cognition remains an uncharted research area. In particular, little is known about the impact of sleep deprivation on sarcasm detection, an ability which, once altered, may hamper everyday social i...
Kissine (2008) argues that English will cannot be treated as a modal without entailing absurd consequences. Broekhuis and Verkuyl (2014) object that this argument rests on faulty scope relations between negation and will. In this short squib I argue that holding both that will scopes over negation and that will is a modal leads to absurd consequenc...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
[Extract] In many languages of the world, the status of 'future' is different from that of present and of past. Past events can be conceived as known through observation, inference, assumption, or report. Statements about the future may involve speculation, prediction, guesses, and so on. In some languages future refers to the location of an event...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting...
Theoretically minded linguists—and particularly, those interested in the cognitive foundations of linguistic competence—sometimes tend to consider (clinical) discourse analysis with disdain. They should not, and Asp and de Villiers’s book magnificently shows why. When language breaks down is a blueprint for a research program and a toolkit for achi...
This study assesses the extent to which children with autism understand requests performed with grammatically non-imperative sentence types. Ten children with autism were videotaped in naturalistic conditions. Four grammatical sentence types were distinguished: imperative, declarative, interrogative and sub-sentential. For each category, the propor...
Pragmatic deficits of persons with autism spectrum disorders [ASDs] are often traced back to a dysfunction in Theory of Mind. However, the exact nature of the link between pragmatics and mindreading in autism is unclear. Pragmatic deficits in ASDs are not homogenous: in particular, while inter-subjective dimensions are affected, some other pragmati...
Both context relativists and circumstance-of-evaluation relativists agree that the traditional semantic interpretation of
some sentence-types fails to deliver the adequate truth-conditions for the corresponding tokens. But while the context relativists
argue that the truth-conditions of each token depend on its context of utterance—each token being...
This paper outlines the 11 contributions to issue 17 of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics, devoted to "Hybrid quotations" (cases of apparent simultaneous use and mention). It also sketches the main issues raised by hybrid quotations, not all of which surface in the contributions: the semantics-pragmatics interface; mixed quotation vs. scare quotin...
John Searle’s philosophy of language contains a notorious tension between a literalist view on the relationship between sentences
and their meanings, and what—at the first glance—appears to be a virulent defence of contextualism. Appearances notwithstanding,
Searle’s views on background and meaning are closer to literalism than to contextualism. Se...
Previous approaches to non-illocutionary uses of speech act verbs (SAVs) concentrated on commissive verbs like promise and threaten, claiming that their non-illocutionary uses result from a subjectification process, and that they therefore describe a subjective relation. Some uses of assertive and directive SAVs do not conform to this pattern: they...
In this paper a series of studies of standard Dutch pronunciation in Belgium and the Netherlands is presented. The research is based on two speech corpora: a diachronic corpus of radio speech (1935-1995) and a synchronic corpus of Belgian and Netherlandic standard Dutch from different regions at the turn of the millennium. It is shown that two dive...
This guide accompanies the following article : Mikhail Kissine, ‘Locutionary, Illocutionary, Perlocutionary’, Language and Linguistics Compass 2/6 (2008) pp. 1189–1202. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749‐818x.2008.00093.x. The terms locutionary act , illocutionary act and perlocutionary act originate from Austin’s classical How to do with words . The correspondin...
Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a mod...
Reconciles armchair theorising about the semantics-pragmatics interface with hypotheses about cognitive architecture. This book concerns with the cognitive counterparts of lexical meanings. It also explores the links between moods and forces. It looks at the epistemological status of semantic theory from the point of view of human psychology.
A psychologically plausible analysis of the way we assign illocutionary forces to utterances is formulated using a ‘contextualist’ analysis of what is said. The account offered makes use of J. L. Austin’s distinction between phatic acts (sentence meaning), locutionary acts (contextually determined what is said), illocutionary acts, and perolocution...
Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the relationship between the form of imperatives, and the wide range of speech acts in which they occur...
This paper deals with the two kinds of commitment associated with assertive speech acts: the commitment to having justifications for the propositional content and the commitment to the truth of this content. It is argued that the former kind of commitment boils down to the monotonic commitment to the truth of the propositional content, and can be c...
J. L. Austin's three-prong distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts is discussed in terms of D. Davidson's theory of action. Perlocutionary acts refer to the relation between the utterance and its causal effects on the addressee. In contrast, illocutionary and locutionary acts are alternative descriptions of the uttera...
This paper attempts to identify general, cross-cultural cognitive factors that trigger the default commissive interpretation of assertions about one's future action. It is argued that the solution cannot be found at the level of the semantics of the English will, or any other future tense marker, but should be sought in the structure of rational in...
In opposition to a common assumption, this paper defends the idea that the auxiliary verb will has no other semantic contribution in contemporary English than a temporal shift towards the future with respect to the utterance
time. Strong reasons for rejecting the idea that will quantifies over possible worlds are presented. Given the adoption of Le...
RésuméCertains verbes illocutoires français connaissent des emplois non-illocutoires qui ne sont pas des personnifications, comme le montre une série de tests syntaxiques et sémantiques. Au sein de ces emplois non-personnifiants, on peut introduire, parallèlement à la taxinomie des actes de langage, une classification qui se fonde sur la nature des...
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