Comprehending conjunctive entailment of disjunction among individuals with Asperger syndrome

ABSTRACT

Although individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) are often described to be semantic-pragmatic disordered, it is still unclear to what extent their semantic comprehension is impaired. The primary goal of this study is to understand the sentence comprehension of adults with AS by investigating their reading processes of sentences involving the conjunctive entailment of disjunction. More specifically, their on-line processes of reading globally ambiguous sentences containing huo ‘or’ in Mandarin Chinese, which can be understood as either a conjunction or a disjunction in simple negative statements, were recorded. The results indicated that both AS and typically developing groups tended to interpret the ambiguous huo as a conjunction. Additionally, both groups consistently spent significantly more time judging the appropriateness of disjunction-biased sentences. It is argued that, for adults with AS, at least some aspects of semantic knowledge are intact. Future studies are suggested to focus on different sentence types to further explore to what extent that semantics is impaired among individuals with AS.

KEYWORDS:

• Asperger syndrome
• semantic-pragmatic disorder
• conjunctive entailment of disjunction
• huo
• ambiguity

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank all the participants for their support of this project. For helpful advice, comments and feedback, we sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers and Editors of Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. Remaining inadequacies are our own.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes

¹ The term Asperger syndrome is preserved in this study because these participants were diagnosed with Asperger syndrome before the diagnosis was dropped from DSM-V. However, as DSM-V combined all the ASD diagnoses and generalized them to the same autism spectrum, some findings about the semantic comprehension of ASD adults will be reviewed.

² Gao, Thornton, Zhou and Crain (Gao et al., 2018, fn., p. 6) claim that, when sentences such as (1) are uttered uttered, the conjunctive reading (1b) is generally perceived as pragmatically inappropriate due to the violation of Grice’s Maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1989), a principle stating that speakers should make the statement as informative as possible. Therefore, the conjunctive reading (1b) is not available in a pragmatically infelicitous context or in an out-of-the-blue context. However, as it will be reviewed later, Liu and Chen (2017) have shown that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese might not acknowledge the existence of the ambiguity in (1) and might treat it as an unambiguous sentence expressing the conjunctive reading. Therefore, the ambiguous meanings of the sentence are interpretable in the out-of-the-blue context.

³ MP refers to modal particle.

⁴ Although the TD group seemed to spend longer time reading the eleventh region in the disjunction-biased condition, possibly due to the larger SD (SD = 468.97), the difference was not statistically significant.

⁵ We thank a reviewer for reminding us of these essential concerns.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.