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Typical and Atypical Pragmatic Functioning of ASD Children and Their Partners: A Study of Oppositional Episodes in Everyday Interactions

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Abstract

Pragmatic functioning of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children is rarely examined in socially-meaningful contexts. This study investigates the way oppositional episodes are handled in such contexts by 25 families, 10 with ASD and 15 with typically-developing children. Oppositions occur whenever someone protests, refuses or denies someone else’s action, request or statement. The analysis focuses on justifications accounting for the opposition and on their immediate persuasive effect. Analyses of 1,065 oppositional episodes show no differences in justifications among partners and children, except for ASD children with a verbal age 3–4 years, who justify less than their matched controls. The persuasive effect of justifications on children and on partners differs according to their group and verbal age. Implications of the study and future perspectives are discussed.

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Notes

  1. In France, research in the health domain needs to obtain the approval of an Ethical Committee for the protection of people (CCPPRB Comité Consultatif de Protection des Personnes pour la Recherche Biomédicale, Paris).

  2. For Mann–Whitney and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, we report Z values when the two samples contain 25 subjects, and respectively U or T values when the two samples contain either 5 or 10 subjects.

  3. For all the following analyses, one-tailed tests were used since directional hypotheses were tested (mean insistence rate after justified FOMs < mean insistence rate after unjustified FOMs).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the France Foundation (Fondation de France). The authors are grateful to the parents, children and siblings of the study, for their kind cooperation, to C. Tardif, for contributing to subjects recruitment, to the Fonds National Suisse pour la Recherche Scientifique for their support in data collection of typically developing children, and to S. Cupello, S. Pingault and A. Romerowski, for their help in the transcription and coding of the data.

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  1. LPPS (Laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Processus de Santé - EA 4057), Institut de Psychologie, Paris Descartes University, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 71, Avenue Edouard Vaillant, 92100, Boulogne-Billancourt, France

    Marie-Hélène Plumet & Edy Veneziano

  2. Laboratory MoDyCo (UMR 7114), CNRS - LPPS (Laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Processus de Santé - EA 4057), Institut de Psychologie, Paris Descartes University, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 71, Avenue Edouard Vaillant, 92100, Boulogne-Billancourt, France

    Edy Veneziano

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  1. Marie-Hélène Plumet
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Correspondence to Edy Veneziano.

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This work is based on a presentation made by the present authors at the International Conference ComSym2011 held in Paris in February 2011, and it is submitted as a contribution to the special issue entitled ‘Communication and symbolic understanding in autism spectrum disorder’ edited by Charles Lewis and Melissa Allen.

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Plumet, MH., Veneziano, E. Typical and Atypical Pragmatic Functioning of ASD Children and Their Partners: A Study of Oppositional Episodes in Everyday Interactions. J Autism Dev Disord 45, 53–67 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2164-0

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