Seminar Team Language 15/09/22

Heather Ferguson, University ok Kent

Inferring meaning from language in autistic adults 

The process of inferring meaning from language is strongly influenced by the wider context, including verbal frame, tone of voice, gestures, and body language, and therefore falls within the pragmatics domain of language processing. A much debated question remains when these characteristics (context dependent) and the sentence’s message (i.e. meaning of individual words, context free) are integrated to extract meaning, and which cognitive and social mechanisms underpin these processes. In this talk I will present a series of experiments from my lab in which we sought to understand how and when listeners infer meaning during language comprehension, focusing on how these processes might be affected in adults with autism spectrum disorder (who experience deficits in both social and executive functioning). I will discuss data across different tasks that vary in the degree to which participants are engaged in an immersive communication setting, using a range of measures to test temporal sensitivity to these contextual cues.