An Exploration of Right-Hemisphere Contributions to the Pragmatic Impairments of Autism

doi:10.1006/brln.1996.0022

Brain and Language

Volume 52, Issue 3, March 1996, Pages 411-434

https://doi.org/10.1006/brln.1996.0022 Get rights and content

Abstract

This study examined the potential contribution of the right hemisphere to the communicative impairments of autism. Pragmatic language measures sensitive to right-hemisphere damage were administered to nonretarded adults with autism and to controls matched on age and intellectual ability. The experimental battery included measures of humor, inference, and indirect request comprehension. Autistic subjects performed significantly less well than controls on all measures, replicating results of an earlier investigation by Rumsey and Hanahan (Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology,12,81, 1990). The performance of the autistic group on the three tasks was also similar to that of right-hemisphere stroke patients reported previously (Molloy, Brownell, & Gardner, in Y. Joanette and H. M. Brownell (Eds.),Discourse ability and brain damage: Theoretical and empirical perspectives,New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990, pp. 113–130). Generalizability of these results and implications for the neuropathology of autism are discussed.

References (0)

Cited by (189)

Humor in autism spectrum disorders: A systematic review
2024, Encephale
Humor is essential to social relationships. Its use and understanding appear to be impaired in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The main objective was to review the existing literature on the detection, understanding and use of humor in persons with ASD. The secondary objective involved exploring assessment scales and specific intervention tools.
A systematic review of the literature was carried out on all available French and English scientific papers about humor – including irony – in persons with ASD up to November 2021. We extracted 552 references and included 43 articles from six databases.
Studies suggest that those with ASD can detect audiovisual and written humor. Understanding humor was impaired in writing and when using pure auditory stimuli and non-verbal cartoons. For irony, the results indicated a lower detection of quality and less understanding in speaking but not in writing. Regarding its use, in terms of expression, people with ASD use benevolent humor less often and do not consider humor as a key source of satisfaction with life, as opposed to the control group.
It appears that it would be worthwhile to develop standardized humor detection and assessment tools specific to persons with ASD. Practical strategies that focus on humor ability could be worth developing, either individually or in groups.
L’humour est essentiel aux relations sociales. Son utilisation et sa compréhension semblent altérées chez les personnes avec Trouble du Spectre de l’Autisme (TSA). L’objectif principal est de faire l’état des lieux des connaissances concernant la détection, la compréhension et l’utilisation de l’humour dans les TSA. Les objectifs secondaires concernent l’exploration des échelles d’évaluation et des outils spécifiques d’intervention.
Une revue systématique de la littérature est réalisée sur l’ensemble des articles scientifiques français et anglais disponibles traitant de l’humour, dont l’ironie, dans les TSA jusqu’en novembre 2021. À partir de six bases de données, nous avons extrait 552 références et inclus 43 articles.
Les études suggèrent que les capacités de détection de l’humour audiovisuel et écrit sont conservées dans les TSA. La compréhension serait altérée à l’écrit et lors de l’utilisation de stimuli auditifs purs et de cartoons non verbaux. Pour l’ironie, les résultats indiquent une détection de qualité et une compréhension réduite à l’oral mais pas à l’écrit. Concernant son utilisation, sur le plan expressif, les personnes avec TSA pratiqueraient moins l’humour bienveillant et ne considéreraient pas l’humour comme un facteur primordial de satisfaction à l’égard de la vie à la différence des témoins.
Il semble intéressant de développer des échelles standardisées de détection et d’évaluation de l’humour spécifiques aux TSA. Des stratégies manuélisées centrées sur les compétences humoristiques seraient intéressantes à développer, en individuel ou dans le cadre de groupes.
Pragmatic language comprehension: Role of theory of mind, executive functions, and the prefrontal cortex
2024, Neuropsychologia
The specific contribution of focal damage of the prefrontal cortex and the cognitive mechanisms accounting for communicative-pragmatic disorders remains unclear. The objective of the current study was to investigate the impact of focal prefrontal cortex damage on the ability to understand indirect speech or hints and to identify the prefrontal neural mechanisms involved. We also examined the underlying cognitive mechanisms of disorders of indirect speech understanding particularly theory of mind and executive functions. Thirty patients with focal prefrontal cortex damage and 30 control subjects were compared on their performances on the Hinting task assessing pragmatic language skills, the "Faux-Pas" task and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task assessing Theory of Mind and a battery of executive tasks. Patients were significantly impaired compared with control subjects on all these abilities. Both deficits of executive functions and theory of mind were able to predict impaired ability of patients in understanding non-literal meanings on the Hinting task. Finally, using voxel-based lesion analysis we identified a partially shared neural prefrontal network involved in all these abilities centered on the dorsomedial and ventral regions of the prefrontal cortex.
Left-hand muscle contractions improve novel metaphor comprehension among adolescents
2024, Journal of Neurolinguistics
For people to understand metaphors that require the creation of associations between remote concepts, both the diffuse spread of activation in semantic networks in the right hemisphere (coarse semantic coding) and the tight and focused spread of activation in the left hemisphere (fine semantic coding) are required. During adolescence, the dynamic between the left and right hemispheres that enables the processing of metaphors is not yet established. Thus, the present study aimed to (1) test whether left-hand muscle contractions that activate the right hemisphere's sensory-motor regions can boost metaphor comprehension in adolescents; (2) compare conventional and novel metaphor processing (with no muscle contractions) in adolescents and adults. For the first goal, 83 adolescents between the ages of 14–16 squeezed a rubber ball with either their right hands, left hands, or not at all (control group) while presented with two-word expressions of four types: literal expressions, conventional metaphors, novel metaphors, and unrelated expressions. Results showed that left-hand muscle contractions led to more accurate processing of literal expressions and conventional and novel metaphors. However, the over-activation of the right hemisphere led to a decreased ability to process unrelated expressions. For the second goal, the adolescent control group was compared with an adult group of participants. Results revealed that despite a general disadvantage in language processing (including conventional metaphors), adolescents were more accurate in processing novel metaphors. Our findings suggest that adolescents' left lateralization for language is not yet established, resulting in over-reliance on coarse semantic coding. In addition, our results demonstrate the effectiveness of a simple, non-invasive technique for enhancing metaphor comprehension in adolescents. This technique may especially benefit adolescents who struggle with metaphor comprehension, such as adolescents with autistic spectrum disorders or with poor social skills.
Young children with autism show atypical prefrontal cortical responses to humanoid robots: An fNIRS study
2022, International Journal of Psychophysiology
Previous behavioral studies have found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show greater interest in humanoid robots than in humans. However, the neural mechanism underlying this is not clear. This study compared brain activation patterns between children with ASD and neurotypical children while they watched videos with robots and humans.
We recruited 45 children with ASD and 53 neurotypical children aged 4–6 years and recorded their neural activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) using a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) device when the two groups interacted with a robot or a human in a video.
First, neural activity in the right DLPFC in children with ASD was significantly lower in the robot condition than in the human condition. Neural activity in the right DLPFC in children with ASD was also significantly lower than that of neurotypical children in the robot condition. Second, the neural activity in the left DLPFC between the human and robot conditions was negatively correlated in children with ASD, while it was positively correlated in neurotypical children. Moreover, neural activity in the left DLPFC in children with ASD was significantly correlated with the ADOS scores in both conditions.
While neurotypical children showed comparable neural activity to humanoid robots and human beings, the children with ASD showed significantly different neural activity under those two conditions. Children with ASD may need more selective attention resources for human interaction than for robot interaction. It is also much more difficult for children with ASD to neglect the attraction of robots. Neural activity of the left DLPFC of children with ASD is correlated with their symptoms, which maybe a possible indicator for early diagnosis. Neural activity of the right DLPFC guided their atypical reactions and engagements with robots. Our study contributes to the current understanding of the neural mechanisms responsible for the different behavioral reactions in children with ASD toward robots and humans.
Ad-hoc and scalar implicatures in children with autism spectrum disorder
2021, Journal of Communication Disorders
Previous studies found that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) perform well on pragmatic inference tests that require the use of the linguistic scale <some, all>. The present study extends previous research by testing two types of implicature: scalar implicatures, based on lexical scales, and ad-hoc implicatures, based on contextual scales.
We tested 26 children with ASD aged 4–10 years (mean age 7.1) and 26 typically developing (TD) children – matched on chronological age and with a similar performance in non-verbal IQ and vocabulary – by means of a picture selection task for scalar and ad-hoc implicatures. We also investigated the effect of children’s scores in standardized tests measuring non-verbal intelligence, lexical, and morphosyntactic abilities and Theory-of-Mind skills on their performance in the implicature tasks.
Although more than half of the children with ASD performed above chance on both kinds of implicatures, their performance as a group was significantly lower than the performance of their TD peers. General cognitive abilities were found to affect the performance of children with ASD on both kinds of implicatures, and Theory-of-Mind reasoning skills were found to be linked to their performance on scalar, but not ad-hoc implicatures.
We show that children with ASD have difficulty with both kinds of implicatures. These findings may have implications for explanatory theories of pragmatics as well as for clinical work with children with ASD.
Exploring cortical activation and connectivity in infants with and without familial risk for autism during naturalistic social interactions: A preliminary study
2019, Infant Behavior and Development
Citation Excerpt :
Similarly, sleeping 1-year-old children at-risk for ASD who listened to natural language vs. auditory stimuli had lower activation in the left superior temporal cortices during natural speech (i.e., reading of bedtime stories) compared to control children with typical language outcomes (Eyler, Pierce, & Courchesne, 2012); with no group differences when hearing simple auditory stimuli. It is suggested that right hemisphere encodes prosodic aspects of speech such as “motherese” and pragmatic aspects of communication such as pauses and intonations (Ozonoff & Miller, 1996) whereas left hemisphere (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) is important for processing of semantics and sentence structure and hence, both would play important roles when processing relatively complex, natural speech (Herringshaw, Ammons, DeRamus, & Kana, 2016). In short, both fronto-parietal and superior temporal cortices in both hemispheres play an important role in processing of social, non-verbal and verbal components of naturalistic interactions with caregivers.
Behavioral signs of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are typically observable by the second year of life and a reliable diagnosis of ASD is possible by 2 to 3 years of age. Studying infants with familial risk for ASD allows for the investigation of early signs of ASD risk within the first year. Brain abnormalities such as hyper-connectivity within the first year may precede the overt signs of ASD that emerge later in life. In this preliminary study, we use functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), an infant-friendly neuroimaging tool that is relatively robust against motion artifacts, to examine functional activation and connectivity during naturalistic social interactions in 9 high-risk (HR; older sibling with ASD) and 6 low-risk (LR; no family history of ASD) infants from 6 to 9 months of age. We obtained two 30-second baseline periods and a 5-minute social interaction period. HR infants showed reduced right and left-hemispheric activation compared to LR infants based on oxy (HbO₂) and deoxy (HHb) signal trends. HR infants also had greater functional connectivity than LR infants during the pre- and post-social periods and showed a drop in connectivity during the social period. Our findings are consistent with previous work suggesting early differences in cortical activation associated with familial risk for ASD, and highlight the promise of fNIRS in evaluating potential markers of ASD risk during naturalistic social contexts.

View all citing articles on Scopus

View full text

Regular ArticleAn Exploration of Right-Hemisphere Contributions to the Pragmatic Impairments of Autism

Abstract

Regular Article
An Exploration of Right-Hemisphere Contributions to the Pragmatic Impairments of Autism