2020 Volume 31 Issue 2 Pages 80-90
This study examined whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could determine the intentions of others' utterances. In the experiment, 17 ASD children and 13 typically developing (TD) children were asked to interpret a speaker's intentions in a video stimulus depicting a mother–son interaction. Although both ASD and TD children had difficulties in interpreting jokes and irony, both groups identified differences between the literal and intended meanings of the speakers' utterances. Evaluation of the participants' eye gaze data revealed that ASD children focused on context-related objects for a longer time than TD children, but TD children looked longer at other objects. Gaze frequencies for both types of objects were higher in TD children than in ASD children. ASD and TD children focused on the speaker's eyes for equally long time. This study suggested that if the related information is saliently presented, ASD children can understand a speaker's intentions. Moreover, helping ASD children to pay attention to potentially important but implicit contextual information may be important for improving their overall comprehension of verbal cues.
