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The Language-Cognition Interface: Insights from typical and atypical development| old_uid | 10949 |
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| title | The Language-Cognition Interface: Insights from typical and atypical development |
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| start_date | 2016/04/19 |
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| schedule | 13h-14h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Amphithéâtre |
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| summary | The ability to attribute mental states to others and reason on the basis of this knowledge is referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM) and is known to be impaired in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A recent body of work on ASD has identified links between ToM, on the one hand, and language skills on the other, in particular grammatical knowledge of sentential complements. These findings have been interpreted to suggest that complement sentences (precisely those of verbs of communication) serve the population with ASD as a tool for figuring out solutions to ToM tasks assessing false-belief understanding. Indeed, in a sentence such as : John says [that the earth is flat], the content of the complement clause (in brackets) is false while the whole sentence may be true. The property of having an independent truth-value to that of the matrix appears to render complement sentences well suited to the purpose of mental representation, also for young typically developing (TD) children.
The aim of this talk is to further investigate this language-cognition relation. First, mastery of sentential complements has been claimed to be a privileged tool used by children and adolescents with ASD when figuring out solutions to ToM tasks. However the influence of this component of language has not yet been compared to other potential tools such as Executive Functions, despite their also plausibly influencing ToM performance. Second, sentential complements have been claimed to play a role in ToM reasoning in individuals with ASD. However ToM has been systematically assessed via a verbal task, therefore the links identified between ToM tasks and complementation tasks may stem from linguistic difficulties impacting scores across the measures used, rather than from the role played by sentential complements in mentalizing. In sum, it has not yet been clearly established that the role of complementation in ToM success in ASD is privileged compared to executive functioning, nor that the impact of complementation underpins the very representation of other minds in this population. In this talk, I will present 2 studies which test the contributory roles of complementation and executive functions on the performance of children and adolescents with ASD on both verbal and nonverbal ToM tasks. The results show that sentential complementation, unlike EF, correlates with ToM performance, and that this correlation persists when the ToM task is nonverbal. These findings provide new evidence in favor of the view that mastery of sentential complements indeed plays a persistent, privileged role in ToM reasoning in ASD. Comparisons will be made with typically developing children as well as other language-impaired populations, and clinical implications will be discussed. |
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| responsibles | Laboissière |
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