ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the pragmatic deficits of children suffering from autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). It also discusses two psychological theories of autism, each related to one aspect of pragmatic competencies, namely the ability to reason about mental states and to integrate contextual information. The theories are namely, theory of mind deficit hypothesis, and the theory of mind impairments in ASD. The chapter presents an argument that part of the communicative impairments of the ASD population might be due to linguistic rather than pragmatic deficits. Various experimental studies have related ASD subject's communication deficits with their weak central coherence. The chapter concludes that while ASD subjects do indeed lack implicit theory of mind skills leading to some deficits in verbal communication, they are not uniformly impaired in the integration of contextual information. Future work should seek to clarify further the exact nature and extent of these linguistic impairments and their relation with pragmatic competencies.
