Although people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have severe problems with pragmatic aspects of language, little is known about their pragmatic reasoning. We carried out a behavioral study on high-functioning adults with autistic disorder (n = 11) and Asperger syndrome (n = 17) and matched controls (n = 28) to investigate whether they are capable of deriving scalar implicatures, which...

Two groups of individuals, one with high-functioning autism and the other with Asperger syndrome were tested using Happé's Strange Stories Test of a more advanced theory of mind (Happé, 1994). This assesses the ability to interpret a nonliteral statement. Relative to normal controls who were IQ and age-matched, individuals with autism or Asperger syndrome performed less well on the task, while ...

Asperger syndrome, first described by the Austrian physician Hans Asperger (1944), is an uncommon disorder whose clinical features overlap with those of autism (Kanner, 1943) and schizoid personality disorder (Wolff & Barlow, 1979; Wolff & Chick, 1980). Some authorities regard it as part of the "autistic spectrum" (Wing, 1981), while others have argued for the need to separate it from autism (R...

Previous work suggests children with autism show superior performance (in relation to their general mental age) on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). Frith interprets this as showing that they have "weak central coherence". In Experiment 1, using an adult level version of this task, we aimed to replicate and extend this finding, first, by collecting response time (RT) data; second, by testing adu...

Using the Swedish Medical Birth Registry (MBR), obstetrical and demographic information was retrieved for 250 children with autism or Asperger syndrome who were born in Malmoe, Sweden, and enrolled at the local Child and Youth Habilitation Center. The reference group consisted of all children born in Malmoe during 1980-2005. Obstetric sub-optimality (prematurity, low Apgar scores, growth restri...

Using the Swedish Medical Birth Registry (MBR), obstetrical and demographic information was retrieved for 250 children with autism or Asperger syndrome who were born in Malmoe, Sweden, and enrolled at the local Childand Youth Habilitation Center. The reference group consisted of all children born in Malmoe during 1980 – 2005. Obstetric sub-optimality (prematurity, low Apgar scores, growth restr...

Previous studies have found a subgroup of people with autism or Asperger Syndrome who pass second-order tests of theory of mind. However, such tests have a ceiling in developmental terms corresponding to a mental age of about 6 years. It is therefore impossible to say if such individuals are intact or impaired in their theory of mind skills. We report the performance of very high functioning ad...