Social cognition and pragmatics: study with autistic children
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1980-8623.2019.4.30603Keywords:
theory of mind, pragmatics, autism.Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the interface between social cognition and language, analyzing the relationships between theory of mind and pragmatics in autistic children. Twenty-Four Brazilian autistic children, between 6 and 12 years of age, participated in the study. The Theory of Mind Scale was utilized to assess the social cognitive skills; and, to evaluate pragmatics, it was used tasks that requested the child to make judgments about literal and non-literal statements (assessed in two subcategories: conversational implicatures and idiomatic expressions). The results indicate that 1) the children manifested a comprehension of literal language significantly superior to the comprehension that they showed towards non literal language, and, 2) the children who had success on false belief tasks had higher scores on idiomatic expressions. These findings support the hypothesis of a positive association between false belief and pragmatic understanding.
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