I attended the 17th annual conference of the Japanese Society for Language Sciences which was held in Beppu, Oita Prefecture in July, 2015. I am not a member of the society, but I went to attend the plenary and the symposium by Dr. Francesca Happe from King’s College London. Needless to mention, Dr. Happe is a specialist in Autism Spectrum Disorder, and her book “Autism: An Introduction to Psychological Theory” has been translated into Japanese. The title of the plenary was “How is language affected by cognitive deficits and differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder?”.
1. Introduction
The core problem of autism had been thought as the language deficiency. However, the focus is on social communication now, and it has been proved that people with autism show no difference in the areas of syntax, morphology, and phonology when compared with the control group.
Some differences are found in the areas of pragmatics and semantics, but it is not still clear what causes developmental delays in functional language of the people with autism.
To understand the language use in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), I would like to talk about 2 cognitive theories; lack of “Theory of Mind” and weakness of “Central Coherence” in this lecture.
2. What does lack of “Theory of Mind” mean?
It is easy to understand that difficulties with social interaction and communication, which are characteristics of ASD, are caused by lack of “Theory of Mind”. “Theory of Mind” refers to the ability to attribute mental states, which are different from one’s own, to others to explain someone else’s actions. We use theory of mind with no difficulty to notice when others have false beliefs. There is a well-known test of Sally and Anne. In that test, Anne takes Sally’s belonging and hides it somewhere else while Sally is out of the room. The children with autism cannot correctly answer a simple theory of mind question “Where will Sally look for her belonging when she comes back to the room?” The fact that the test result and what happens in daily life show same phenomenon is important; the children with autism cannot “read others’ minds”. This phenomenon shares some common points with problems such as having difficulty in understanding secrets and lies: thus, they cannot take others’ perspectives.
2.1 Theory of Mind and communication in ASD
The actual problem that people with ASD have is that they cannot understand the speaker’s and the listener’s intention. It is often seen that people with ASD excessively focus on the literal meanings of “vague expressions”. They are confused with expressions such as “We will be going swimming in the mini bus.” Or “cried his eyes out”.
There are many tests that ask people with ASD to explain why the speaker uses non-literal expressions such as idiomatic phrases, irony, lies, innocent lies, jokes, pretense, double bluff, etc. This test result clearly relates to the result of the false-beliefs test (e.g. Sally and Anne test). Furthermore, people with high-functioning autism have no problem passing most of the tests, but they tend to make simple mistakes that people with typical-development nor non-ASD people wouldn’t make. For example, if a lady who wants to sell her kittens threatens a girl by saying, “If you don’t buy these kittens, I would drown them.” Then an ASD examinee would answer “That must be a joke.” (An ASD examinee cannot grasp the speaker’s real intention of selling the kittens which is not literally expressed.)
I incorporated the Relevance theory to see how the lack of Theory of Mind interferes the comprehensions of metaphorical expressions. The result indicated that comprehensions of metaphorical expressions require first-order Theory of Mind. (Expressions such as “John is a rock.”, not a simile “John is like a rock” that can be understood literally.) And to understand irony, second-order Theory of Mind is necessary.
2.2 Theory of Mind and language acquisition in ASD
As Bloom’s research shows, children with typical-development do not simply relate a new word that they hear with what they are seeing at that moment; instead, they try to understand the meaning of a new word from speaker’s intention, including his/her eye movement and gestures. It is true that children with ASD often fail to relate a new word to a new subject, because they have difficulties understanding the speaker’s intentions. This partially explains the empirical facts why children with ASD are slow in language acquisition. Then why can they fairly acquire words? It has not been answered fully yet, but my research provides hypothetical tips to this question. If children with ASD acquire words differently from children with typical-development, then it will be important to understand how they acquire words to support their language acquisition.
2.3 Language acquisition and the result of “Theory of Mind” tasks
Most of the children with ASD cannot pass “Theory of Mind” tasks that deal with primary false-beliefs, but few children can, and that seems to relate to their language ability. To pass the same “Theory of Mind” tasks that children with typical-development or children with mental retardation can pass, ASD children need to have high linguistic mental age. Researchers understood this phenomenon as when children with typical-development can do Theory of Mind tasks intuitively, children with ASD work on the tasks using different skills that fully rely on words.
3. Detail-focused cognitive style in ASD
We think the reasons why people with ASD lack social communication skills cannot be explained by the simple cognitive interpretation. It is related to genetics, nerve systems, and cognitive factors. ASD symptoms come from many different factors that are combined and collaborate with each other. Lack of “Theory of Mind” theory is only a part of such compound, and cannot be used to explain insistence on sameness, cognitive impairment, specific skills, etc. However, these characteristics reflect detail-focused cognitive style that Frith called “weak central coherence”. The skill to grasp and integrate the detailed information from the context and abstract the meanings, which is called central coherence, is week in ASD. Thus, following problems are seen in language acquisition of people with ASD.
3.1 Weak central coherence and language in ASD
Unlike people with typical-development, people with ASD do not integrate words in sentences. This is clearly seen in experiments where people with ASD are asked to read aloud the sentences with homonyms. (For example, they are asked to recite a sentence such as “In her eyes there was a big tear”.) And this experimental result shows no correlation with the result of Theory of Mind tests. Also, researches have proven that weak central coherence and executive function are not relevant, especially not to the weakness of inhibitory control. In our research, in which sentence completion tasks are used, people with ASD often fail to refer to the meaning of a whole sentence. (For example, if they are asked to complete a sentence such as “Little boys grow up to be men and…?”, ASD group tends to choose “women” instead of “strong”.) Furthermore, this experimental result shows no relevance to the results of Go/No-Go test on inhibitory control skills. Also, when the same test was performed with ADHD group, the number of people failing to complete a sentence with a right word, referring to the meaning of the whole sentence, wasn’t any larger, although their inhibitory control skills are weak. The new sentence completion tasks of Burgess and Shallice which involve the executive functions tests will be discussed.
Weak central coherence may be hypothesis for language integration features of people with ASD. Fragmented and enumerative speech is expected for people with ASD, and it is a characteristic of how ASD people understand the meaning of sentences by focusing on the details of the words. Many researches have shown specificity of the narration of the people with ASD, and the difficulties they face in daily communication clearly relate to the weak central coherence.
Information is integrated at many levels, so weakness in central coherence would influence language skills at levels other than context and meaning. Booth and I did a test on their skill to identify specific phonemes in independent non-language. As a result, a group with typical-development tends to identify the specific phonemes more when they are at the beginning of a word, rather than in the middle or at the end of a word. Whereas an ASD group had little difficulty identifying the specific phoneme no matter where in a word they are placed. More researches about central coherence on phonetic level are expected in the future. Davis, Heaton and I have introduced an individual with ASD who has perfect pitch not only for musical notes, but also for environmental sound and speech. This individual cannot understand the meaning of the words in conversation, because s/he tends to focus on the details of the pitch of each speaker. We assume this may be the cause for large deficit in the development of communication skills.
4. Future researches
There remain many questions unanswered in the unique communication of the people with ASD, making it a treasure trove of research. Above all, more research should be conducted on their semantic specificity. How do the lack/deficit of Theory of Mind and the weakness of central coherence relate to the semantic cognitive structure of each ASD individual? Should we adopt “Relevance Theory”? Why do some of the people with ASD cannot acquire a language at all? And why some of them acquire a language once, but lose it later? Why do people with ASD have better expressive language than receptive language? Why do children with ASD speak with peculiar pitch contours? And why do they talk like “little professor” as Kannar and Asperger have reported? And last, if Theory of Mind is important for language acquisition, why do some children with ASD start speaking without delay and why do some of them show remarkable aptitude? These may be future research issues.
This is a rough summary of her lecture.
After the symposium, I personally asked questions about foreign language acquisition of the people with ASD, which I was particularly interested in. She said not much research has been conducted in this area, but there seems to be a tendency that some people with ASD show remarkable aptitude in foreign language acquisition, while some cannot acquire a foreign language at all. I have heard about an individual with ASD who cannot follow a speech in a foreign language despite how hard he tries. He can read, but cannot carry on oral communication in a foreign language. Many ideas come to mind as I read over her lecture. That individual with ASD said that his teacher had told him “You speak bossy.” Since he was in elementary school, he did not speak the dialect at all, he had spent time alone reading books and magazines because he didn’t have any friends, and that he often had watched diet relay which normally wouldn’t be an interest of children. Per his own analysis, he had not acquired Japanese as a mother tongue through communication, but rather learned it as a foreign language. I am also interested in how that is related to the phenomenon of grammatically correct, but peculiar speech style of ASD children. It was very informative.
On the other hand, in the recent research of auditory processing disorders, attention is drawn to the background factors of this disorder; developmental disorder and double-limited problem of children in multilingual environment. In the case of developmental disorder, people tend to pretend they understand the conversation (as a source of success in life) although they cannot catch the meaning. Thus, others may not notice the symptoms. Same may happen to children in multilingual environment. Also, auditory processing disorders may relate to language acquisition of an adult with developmental disorders, especially to the deficit of listening comprehension skills. (Refer to Chie Obuchi “Assessment and treatment of auditory processing disorders” Logopedics and Phoniatrics 56-4)
There is sex bias in its prevalence, but there are a certain number of people with ASD. That means there must be a certain number of people with ASD in a group of foreigners studying Japanese in Japan. There are many difficulties that foreigners have about language acquisition, such as family issues, school, working conditions, characteristics of the area they live in. In addition to that, there may be cases where common language education would not work due to their innate developmental disorders. This is an important issue that we, language teachers, must take into consideration.
