Personal Pronoun Comprehension and Theory of Mind in Autistic Adults

Purpose: Pronouns stitch together discourse by linking referents within and across sentences. Previous research has shown that people often rely on two strategies to interpret pronouns: the subject bias (assuming the pronoun refers to the subject of a prior sentence) and the repeated mention bias (assuming it refers to a person that was mentioned repeatedly). The present study seeks (a) to determine whether autistic adults make use of these strategies to the same degree as non-autistic adults with similar language skills and (b) to assess whether use of these strategies is correlated with theory of mind or vocabulary knowledge. Method: Native English-speaking autistic and non-autistic adults completed a pronoun comprehension task, as well as a modified version of Happe's Strange Stories task, the Vocabulary Size Test (VST), and the Autism Spectrum Quotient Test. Results: Both groups used both strategies most of the time with no reliable differences between the groups. Performance on the VST predicted use of the subject bias strategy. Conclusions: Autistic adults use some of the same strategies for interpreting ambiguous pronouns as non-autistic adults with similar language skills. Variation in subject bias strategy use is correlated with vocabulary knowledge, a sensitive measure of variation in language skills. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28598084