Do autistic children fail to understand pragmatics rules, or fail to understand minds?

Luke Kundl Pinette, Hampshire College

INTRODUCTION

Language difficulty in autistic children, when intelligence is accounted for, is effectively tied to difficulties in the domain of pragmatics, governing the social use of language. Much of this difficulty has been tied to theory-of-mind difficulties (Happe, 1993; Happe, 1995), however autistic children display a few difficulties that theory of mind appears not to explain. One explanation was presented by Surian & al (1996), who argued that autistic subjects fail to understand the Gricean Maxims. The Gricean Maxims (see below) are a set of rules proposed by the philosopher Paul Grice, that govern all human communication. I contend that pragmatic rules are an integral part of language, and that these rules are best assessed by considering the nature and purpose of violations that occur. I contend that because these rules are a part of language autistic children understand these rules, however much difficulty they may have in applying them. Autistic difficulties in pragmatics come in spite of these rules because of difficulty understanding the listener's beliefs. The definition of theory of mind used by Happe may not cover all such reasoning about listeners' beliefs. Autistic children may have difficulty connecting their beliefs about the listener's knowledge, or may have difficulty understanding of beliefs or emotions as distinguished from knowledge. Alternatively, autistic subjects may apply social heuristics to compensate for a theory of mind deficiency,

making themselves appear more competent at theory of mind than they are, or autistic subjects may suffer from a difficulty in self-corrective behavior. However, despite the heterogeneity of the symptoms of autism, I suspect that autistic social and communication difficulties are caused by difficulties in a single mechanism which is independent of language.

GRICE'S MAXIMS AND GRICEAN VIOLATIONS

Philosopher Paul Grice proposed four rules which govern human communication. The Maxim of Quality states that a speaker should not say that which they believe to be false, or for which they lack sufficient evidence to convince them of the veracity of their beliefs. The Maxim of Quantity holds that a speaker should provide all the information that a listener will find necessary to understand an utterance, and no more than necessary. The Maxim of Manner requires the speaker to say things clearly and straightforwardly. And the Maxim of Relevance requires that all information be necessary to a conversation. These maxims are governed by an overall "Co-operative Principle," the requirement that a speaker make their contribution helpful. However speakers frequently violate Grice's Maxims, and often these violations are purposeful (Mooney, 2003). In his paper, Grice proposed four scenarios in which a listener will violate these maxims. 1. A speaker may violate a maxim in order to mislead. 2. A speaker may explicitly opt-out of a maxim or the co-operative principle in general. 3. Two or more maxims may be in conflict, and a listener must violate one to obey anotherthe clash condition. 4. A speaker may openly flout a maxim. The clash condition is inherent in the CP, and Wilson and Sperber (1981) remove it from the taxonomy. The remaining conditions thus depend on a

speaker's beliefs about the listener's beliefs, and the speaker's action. If the speaker assumes that the listener is unaware of the violation and chooses to make the violation clear, they will explicitly opt-out. If a speaker believes that the listener is unaware of the Gricean violation, they are being dishonest. And if a speaker believes that the listener is aware, the violation is an attempt at irony or humor. I argue that the opt-out condition is not, strictly speaking a violation of Grice's Maxims in the same way as a violation or a flout is. Because the speaker is providing the listener with information that is literally true "I won't tell you," the speaker is being both straightforward, and co-operative as the situation allows. Frequently, opt-outs are not actually opt-outs, so much as preludes to other sorts of violations. A speaker who tells their listener "my lips are sealed" may be lying or teasing, and not actually intending to continue the opt-out. However because opt-

outs are committed at face value, the opt-out condition is uninteresting on it's own, and for my purposes I will not regard incidences of opt-out violations.

THE CASE FOR AMBIGUITY AS AN ADDITIONAL VIOLATION CONDITION This leaves two types of pragmatic violation: overt flouting and covert violations, however these do not describe the full range of possible violations. In many cases, the speaker makes an utterance believing that the speaker will be uncertain whether a violation is intended. These are violations of the Maxims of Quantity and Manner, and their purposes can vary, and include teasing, face saving, or buying time. In the classic example of the quantity violation, John asks Bob what he thought of his presentation, and Bob replies "It is hard to give a good presentation." (Holtgraves, 2005). Here, Bob's utterance can be interpreted as A. "John gave a surprisingly good presentation," or B. "John gave a sub-optimal presentation," where Bob is

buying time or saving face. However in practice, if John gave a good presentation, Bob would have said so, and John will interpret Bob's response as B, unless he thinks that Bob is teasing. Teasing is less likely here, largely because of the context. In a relationship scenario, teasing is much more likely. Imagine that John likes Sarah, and asks Sarah's friend Jane whether there are anybody Sarah likes. If Jane tells John "Oh yes, she mentioned she had a crush on somebody." it is unclear whether A. Sarah likes John and is teasing. B. Sarah likes another man and is teasing or C. this is all Sarah knows. However teasing doesn't require ambiguity about whether a violation has occurred. If Jane tells John "Oh, there's this guy she likes very much, I think you know him," it's clear that she is withholding information, thereby violating the maxim of Quantity, and also clearly teasing. While lies and irony are both treated as quality violations (Mooney, 2003), and ambiguous violations treated as quantity or manner (Holtgraves, 2005) violations, this appears to stem from fidelity to Grice's taxonomy of conversational principles. There is a fairly limited body of literature which examines quality and quantity violations together (Surian, Baron-Cohen, & Van Der Lely, Eskritt, Whalen, & Lee, 2008; Katsos & Bishop, in press), and what research there is compares outright dishonesty with insufficient responses. Katsos & Bishop's work indicates that, when asked to rate responses on helpfulness adults and children both rate quantity violations as less helpful than honesty, but more helpful than lies (represented by random responses). Eskritt, Whalen, & Lee found that, when they can win rewards by asking questions of puppets, children learn to detect quantity violations only after they detect irrelevant responses and dishonesty. However, because ironic responses should either assume or provide sufficient information (e.g. a puppet who is being ironic should declare that "It's certainly not in that cup"), I would suspect that they would rate well above quality violations in terms of helpfulness, though

likely below non-violations.

TERMINOLOGY

I use the terms transparent violation to describe such pragmatic violations as irony, hyperbole, and jokes, where the speaker believes that the listener will detect a violation. I use the term opaque violation to describe violations of dishonesty, where the speaker believes that the listener will not detect a violation. I use the term ambiguous violation to describe violations where the speaker expects the listener to be uncertain about the occurrence of a violation (i.e. violations of quantity), and I describe such violations in terms of their transparency and opacity. So far as I am aware, this terminology is not generally used to categorize Gricean violations, however it is similar to the concept of overt and covert violations used by Wilson & Sperber. Additionally, one of my hypotheses considers autistic beliefs about others, and considers their understanding of another individual's beliefs and emotions, which can only be understood by that individual, and another individual's belief about facts. I term these internal beliefs and external beliefs respectively.

A TAXONOMY OF VIOLATIONS INDEPENDENT OF MAXIM

My analysis thus far has focused on the Maxims of Manner, Quality, and Quantity, and I have largely ignored relevance. However relevance is absolutely essential to conversation, and

autistic children often have difficulty understanding what information is relevant to a conversation (Attwood). I argue that unintentional relevance violations by autistic children stems from the same root as their difficulties understanding purposeful violations of quality and quantity/manner. Understanding that information is relevant requires the speaker to determine what the listener wants to know. Even if a speaker understands that contributions to a

conversation must be relevant, if a speaker cannot understand a listener's thoughts, they will be unable to apply that rule. Work by de Villiers & Kenyon (in press) indicates that autistic children also have difficulty with relevance implicatures. Relevance implicatures require that the listener infer information from their own background information. They are similar to metaphor in that they are intended to highlight a point, however rather than violating the Maxim of Quality, they violate the Maxim of Manner, answering a question in an indirect way. Examples include 1:Where's the Car? / Your mother had a meeting. Relevance implicatures also include rhetorical questions. Unfortunately, this work does not consider the theory of mind abilities of autistic subjects, so it is unclear whether relevance implicatures work more like metaphor or irony. While the example above is transparent, deception can be rooted in implicature. An irrelevant response to a question can lead the listener to draw inaccurate conclusions. For example, imagine that Alice decides to play hookey, and Alice's brother has a cold, which he has passed on to a large number of people. Alice tells her teacher afterwards that her brother had a cold he was giving out like candy, the implication is that she caught the cold. However this is nor an outright lie. For the purposes of this paper, I am only examining quality and quantity violations. However, given the aforementioned work, I would expect that autistic children might have more difficulty construing the Alice example and like constructions as dishonest.

As these examples make clear, violations get trickier when responses are not direct, regardless of the integrity and completeness of the statement. Nevertheless, we can still use the listener-knowledge criterion to classify violations. Literally true, but misleading statements rely on speaker assumptions that the listener will be unable to detect the violation, and are therefore opaque. Ironic, humorous, sarcastic, and empathetic statements are transparent, assume that the speaker will detect the violation. And tactful/evasive utterances assume that the listener will suspect, but be uncertain. And we see that the speaker's assumption about the listener's knowledge also corresponds with the listener's purpose. A violation which intends to mislead relies on speaker assumptions that the listener will miss the violation. A violation which is intended to drive home a point, as with irony, jokes, and rhetorical questions the speaker assumes the listener will catch the violation. And a violation which intends to tease or save face assumes that the speaker will catch the violation, but will be uncertain that the violation is intended. The last sort of violation is most difficult for the listener, and there is a gradient between teasing, which is fairly explicit, and face-saving which is less explicit. However work by Holtgraves (2005) indicates that when asked to consider themselves in the position of listener, people tend to take the negative interpretation of ambiguous responses, indicating that these are general perceived as tactful letdowns.

SUBDIVISIONS OF TRANSPARENT VIOLATIONS Happe did not examine the differences between different forms of transparent violations. While irony and sarcasm state something largely the opposite of what the speaker means, hyperbole exaggerates the speaker's meaning, and jokes (at least of the situational humor type)

describe a counterfactual situation straightforwardly. Because of the hetereogenity of jokes, however, I believe that it would be extremely difficult for any experiment to give them adequate attention and still properly consider other violations. As jokes are also generally separate from the surrounding discourse, I therefore leave aside all further discussion of them to focus on violations which occur within the discourse. I suspect, that hyperbole may prove different from irony. Exaggeration may be unclear, particularly when applied to social situations, and as rhetorical questioned and relevance implicatures make clear though the name varies by context, both the method (exaggeration) and the purpose (emphasis) are fairly consistent. However I'm not certain that this merits separate examination, and am inclined to leave it to a future experiment. Brumark (2006) did consider the nature of different sorts of violations in examining the dinnertime conversations of Swedish families with typically developing children. However she focused on a subset of transparent violations: irony/sarcasm, and jokes. Brumark is a

sociolinguist, and her paper highlights the drawbacks of a production study for psychological purposes: lies and highly opaque violations will be largely undetectable both to the listeners and to the researchers.

THE QUALITIES OF A LIE Coleman & Kay argue that the concept of "lie" is composed of three closely related requirements. The utterance must be false, the subject must be aware that the belief is false, and the subject must intend to deceive. This last distinction requires second-order theory of mind, as is clear if we reframe this requirement as "the speaker must believe that the listener will not detect a violation." It is this last distinction which distinguishes a lie from irony, and also this last

distinction which most people find the most important feature of a lie. Irony and hyperbole Colman & Kay also note that additional factors may affect the prototypicality of a lie, though they provide only one example, which they decline to test. The difference between malicious and "white" lies is dependent on speaker intent, a speaker who is trying to spare the feelings of the listener will be a less pure example of a self-serving lie than a malicious lie, though when pressed, subjects will rank these subjects as a lie. An additional factor which Coleman and Kay do not consider is the difference between lying by omission and commission. Take an example where a man's wife asked him where he went after work. The man went to the pharmacy to pick up his medication, and then by the pharmacist to pick up some flowers, which he delivered to his mistress. He tells himself that he went by the pharmacist, and commits a violation of quantity. It is clear intended to mislead, and most people would consider this a lie. However, if pressed on it, I suspect that most people would say that this is not exactly a lie, because it lacks the necessary trait of being untrue. The reverse is true with white lies, which meet all of the qualities of a lie, but aren't malicious. White lies, however, often have a degree of ambiguity about the speaker's knowledge. The listener knows that in most contexts a friend, associate, or even perfect stranger, will have reason to spare their feelings, and the speaker usually knows that the listener knows this. It is therefore possible that white lies might feel less like a prototypical lie not because they are not malicious, but because they are not entirely opaque, and in many cases are closer to the facesaving described by Holtgraves. I suspect that expect people would interpret lies about adultery more harshly than lies about appearance or performance. There is, of course a difference in magnitude between adultery and a concert performance, though I suspect social expectations

(whether the friend of a cuckold believes that ignorance is bliss, or believes the victim has a right to know) would play a role.

DOUBLE BLUFFS One issue that I have not yet considered is the nature of a double bluff, in which a speaker intends the listener to perceive a violation, without actually demonstrating a violation. This is typified by the old joke about two Soviets on a train. One Soviet asks the first "Comrade, where are you going." The second Soviet responds "Comrade, I have business in Minsk." The first speaker responds "Comrade, you lie! You tell me you are going to Minsk, so I will think you are going to Pinsk. But I know you are really going to Minsk!" Double bluffs are rarely so explicit, and also, I suspect, much rarer in real conversation, at least in their pure form. However, double bluffs are more common in the intermediate ranges of violations. Using teasing as an example, a bully might exert her dominance by telling another student "Oh, my god, that dress looks horrible on you." with a smile. The bully may very well believe that the dress looks horrible, but it is not clear to the listener whether the bully intends to tease or insult, given the mixed messages. Such double-bluff teasing can also be used to reenforce white lies. Take an example where a man asks his friend "I'm so sorry, my guitarplaying was horrible, wasn't it?" His friend tired of reassuring the aspiring artist of his talent but unwilling to be honest, might tell his friend that "Oh yes, absolutely unbearable, a deaf howler monkey could do better." I have not seen much about double bluffs in the literature, except as a part of a broader pragmatic test. However double bluffs are interesting in relation to autism, both because they seem to require an additional level of social knowledge beyond second order theory of mind, and

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because, they are necessary, from a game theoretical perspective, for ambiguity to work. If negative comments are predictably ironic, and white lies are consistently positive, the only ambiguity would be whether positive comments are sincere, and conversation would be nearly as clear as if people were always straightforward.

GRICEAN VIOLATIONS AND AUTISM

Wing (in Frith, 1991) described autism as a "triad of impairments" in social skills, communication, and creativity. Communication deficits occur primarily in the domain of

pragmaticsthe use of languagesyntax and semantics develop normally when controlling for IQ, and there is some indication that these pragmatic deficits are caused by theory of mind impairment. Autistic deficits occur particularly in the domain of theory of mind (Happe, 1993; Happe, 1995; Hale & Tager-Flusberg, 2005). Theory of mindthe ability to reason about other people's thoughtsis a social ability. Researchers distinguish first-order theory of mindthe ability to think about what somebody else might be thinkingfrom second order theory of mindthe ability to reason about what somebody else might be thinking about oneself or a third person. Happe (1993) found that theory of mind is directly connected to autistic subjects' ability to understand irony and metaphor. Subjects without theory of mind are able to understand similes, but not metaphor or irony. Subjects with first order theory of mind but not second-order are

able to understand metaphor, but not irony. Understanding of irony is dependent on second order theory of mind.

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Metaphor, in addition to requiring only first-order theory of mind, generally adheres to the co-operative principle. If you ask me whether Tom is reliable, and you tell me "Tom is a saint," while your speech is not literally true, you are not giving your listener difficulty, but rather providing helpful information. Metaphor requires one simple rule to understand, that a metaphor is a simile with the comparison word removed, moving the processing from the syntactic to the pragmatic level. By contrast, second order violations violate the co-operative principle, and those force the listener to make guesses about the speaker's knowledge and intentions to determine whether a violation has occurred, and what the purpose is. And generally, second-order violations have three broad purposes, which can be predicted by the nature of their use. Irony and humor require the listener to process the fact that a violation has occurred. Lies and deceit hope that the speaker will not detect the violation, and are a clear example of non-cooperation. And then there is ambiguous speech, where it is unclear whether a violation has occurred, but when intentional save face for the speaker, or lessen the impact of negative speech on the listener. Not only are these non-co-operative, but also highly-cost intensive on the listener, requiring the listener to determine whether a violation has occurred, and whether that violation is intentional. Happe's work found that, even once theory of mind is accounted for, autistic children still perform slightly worse than non-autistic children. I can think of at least two distinct explanations for this, both of which bear some consideration. One possibility is that there is a distinction between understand knowledge, and understanding feeling. This interpretation would be in line with recent findings on autistic subjects an mirror-neuron deficits, however there is another possibility. Fabricius & al. (In press) found that at a certain developmental phase children who pass a false belief task will nevertheless fail a true belief task. Fabricius attributes this to use of

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an "availability heuristic" in which children assume that if somebody does not see something, they cannot know the result, and will get it wrong.

LIES, DECEIT, AND AUTISM The literature indicated that autistic subjects have difficulty with both humor and deceit, and anecdotal accounts by researchers provide many examples (Frith, 1991; Attwood, 1998). Autistic subjects often make jokes that are unclear, are unclear to the listener, and when retelling jokes will omit elements which are critical to the humor. This may relate to difficulties with

narrative competence described by Capp, Losh, and Thurber (2000). These researchers found that autistic children have difficulty determining what information is relevant to a listener, and in describing emotional states. Autistics subjects often have difficulty lying outright (Attwood, 1998), and though I can find no literature that demonstrates this is more problematic than children at a similar level of development, I can attest personally that many autistic subjects avoid outright lies in favor of misleading wordings. I've spoken with language specialists about this, and it is not clear whether autistic individuals may avoid outright lying because they find it difficult, or find it difficult because they avoid it. Autistic difficulty with narrative and lying, however seem to indicate that even when autistic subjects understand the rulesthat humor and irony assume the speaker has adequate information to detect a violation, and deceit assumes the speaker doesn't, autistic subjects often have difficulty applying the rules, and that this difficulty seems to be an issue of awareness of listener needs. Autistic subjects are also known to have immense difficulty with teasing, which is not as

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straightforward as humor (Attwood, 1998), and indicates a difficulty with the shades of violation between humor and deceit. Teasing, in fact, is particularly difficult, because it can be difficult to tell whether a teaser intends to joke with the subject or put them down, and there are no simple heuristics to resolve it, as there are for metaphor. It seems, therefore that autistic children may have additional social difficulties to theory of mind, such as an egocentric interpretation of what information is relevant, difficulty understanding emotions, or may over-extend rules. These explanations are not mutually

exclusive, but to examine either explanation, we must first demonstrate that autistic subjects actually do understand social rules, beyond the anecdotal evidence. Autistic subjects are often notorious for being rigid and rule-bound. If autistic children used heuristics to compensate for lack of actual social understanding, this might explain the differences between autistic and typically developing children. While these two beliefs are not mutually exclusive, it should be easier to falsify the first hypothesis than the second.

EXPERIMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS

Part of my argument is that violations can be understood along a spectrum of clarity, and autistic understanding of the distinction of lies and irony is essential to this argument. However this is insufficient, given that a pragmatic measure already exists for determining whether the subject can distinguish a lie from a joke, and has been used on autistic subjects (Tager-Flusberg), and given the other issues I have raised. Any experiment should address either the question of ambiguous violations, double-bluffing, or both.

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Though my ultimate goal is to demonstrate that autistic subjects have an understanding of pragmatic rules that is confounded by a deficiency in social intuition, there is a rather large gap in the literature that needs to be filled to support this contention. However, one implication of this hypothesis is that autistic children might have more difficulty reasoning about beliefs and feelings than reasoning about facts. I would expect autistic children to have substantially more difficulty identifying violations in the speaker's opinion than violations of fact. It would be difficult to control for listener knowledge about facts, however that might be partially circumvented if the speaker states about facts it is clear that the listener does not know about. I might also expect autistic subjects to respond differently to situations involving third parties than situations involving themselves, especially if an egocentric understanding of the world is the root of autistic children's difficulties. While an experiment in which the subject is a conversational participant would be optimal, it would be very difficult to be certain autistic subjects are aware of covert violations. And if self awareness is an issue with autism, then on being explicitly informed of a violation, subjects might be unable to consider their prior state of ignorance. For this reason, it will be necessary in any experiment to present the subject as an outside observer, despite the difficulties inherent in this model. On the other hand, theory of mind tasks are almost always presented with the subject as a non-participant in the interaction (which raises some questions on its own), and so I do not think that this is especially problematic in the context of my experiment. Based on Happe's research, I would expect that autistic children's assessment of the nature of a lie would be dependent on their level of theory of mind. That is, autistic subjects without first-order theory of mind would rate all factually inaccurate utterances equally as lies. For autistic subjects with first order theory of mind, the speaker's beliefs about the subject would

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play a larger role, but intent would be ignored, causing autistic subjects to conflate lies and irony. I would expect Autistic subjects with second order theory of mind to perform similarly to nonautistic subjects. If autistic children understand rules, but lack the theory of mind to implement them, then explicitly priming the children for theory of mind should lead autistic children to perform the same as typical children. Whereas if autistic children have difficulty with non-literal speech for other reason we would expect autistic children to perform differently than typically developing children, even when theory of mind is taken into account.

POSSIBLE EXPERIMENTAL MODELS My experiment is largely based on four previous experimentsStrichartz and Burton (1990), in a study of children derived from Coleman and Kay (1981), Katsos and Bishop (In press), and Whalen, Eskritt, and Lee (2008). Coleman & Kay (1981) present one model for an experiment. Though their paper is on prototype semantics, by dividing lies into three parts based on truth conditions, they get at speaker awareness about truth conditions, and speaker beliefs about listener awareness of truth conditions. In so doing, they cover a wide range of violation conditions, including irony and double bluff. The follow-up study of children by Strichartz and Burton (1990) removed the

irony and double bluff conditions, in favor of unintentional lying. Though this worked for the fact/speaker belief/intent to deceive paradigm, the subtle difference in my fact/speaker belief about fact/speaker belief about listener belief rendered this unusable, since the speaker of an accidental lie knows that it will deceive. I thus attempted to maintain the irony distinction in the original paper.

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In this first task, I also drew extensively on the methodology presented by Katsos and Bishop, a suite of experiments in which children were shown videos of a pragmatic violation, and asked to rate the truthfulness of said study using stars. Finally, for a game task, I drew on the methodology of Whalen, Eskritt, and Lee (2008). Their task had children choose between a truth-telling puppet and one of three puppets to locate a prize. The Gricean violators they used werea quality violator who answered at random, a quantity violator who gave insufficient information, and a relevance violator who gave irrelevant information.

METHODS SUBJECTS Subjects were 11 autistic children (2 F, 9 M), ages 7-16, recruited through community resources for people with autism, and 13 non-autistic children (9 F, 4 M), ages 4-10 recruited through the Smith College Campus School and the Hampshire College Children's Center.

STIMULI Stimuli were two theory of mind tasksthe bake sale task and the birthday task, a set of videos the TONI-II Test of Nonverbal Intelligence, and a game with puppets.

THEORY OF MIND TASKS The theory of mind tasks include two stories, each with four pictures. In the bake sale task, Marie goes to buy brownies, in the birthday task, Jack is planning on going to the zoo. As plans change, the children are prompted to make sure they follow the stories, and asked

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questions about the characters' beliefs.

VIDEOS Videos attempted to replicate each of eight conditions for truth valueson three dimensions: whether the statement was factual, whether the speaker believed the statement to be factual, and whether the speaker expected the listener to take the statement as factual. I name these for convenience, and describe them below. 0 indicates actual truth, 1 the speaker's belief about the truth, and 2 the speakers belief about whether the listener will be deceived. Prototypical lie: 0F 1F 2F Honest mistake: 0F 1T 2T Prototypical truth: 0T 1T 2T Accidental truth: 0T 1F 2F Each of these conditions was presented in four scenariostwo accident scenarios (milk, lamp) and two event scenarios (birthday, gift). In the accident scenarios, a puppet is fighting with a dog, and the milk or lamp is knocked over by the puppet, the dog, or an unexpected actor aliens or elves. These scenarios, consisted of four lines, an aside in which the puppet states they believe happened, the mother's question about what happened, the puppet's response, and the mother's reaction. In the event scenarios, one puppet asks a question, the other puppet makes an aside, and answers the question, we then see the actual result. All scripts used are included in the appendix.

Accident Example (Milk, prototypical lie): Chris spills the milk.

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Chris: Oh no! I must've spilled the milk. Mom: Who spilled the milk? Chris: The dog did it. Mom: Oh, OK.

Event Example (Gift, prototypical irony): Lee: Where did Mary go? Sue (aside): Mary went to buy bread. Sue: She went to buy a dragon. Lee: Oh, very funny. Mary: I bought some bread.

Each scenario had three possible actuality conditions that described what actually happened: two straightforward conditions that distinguished truth from lies and mistakes, and one absurd condition that attempted to denote the double bluff. Actual statements were either absurd or non-absurdfor example, in the milk scenario, Chris always claims the dog or aliens spilled the milk. The 32 videos were arranged in a Latin square, with each child seeing eight videos, two from each scenario, with each of these two having different actuality conditions.

TONI-II The TONI-II is a non-verbal IQ test, in which children find the picture that fits with a pattern.

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GAME The game, based on Whalen, Eskrit, and Lee (2008), required children to find a sticker. The experimenter hid a sticker under one of three different colored cups. To find the sticker, subjects had to chose between two puppets, each of whom consistently answered in a different way. Quality Violator (Liar): Quantity Violator: Ironic Violator: Non-Violator: It's under (random) cup. It's under the cup. It's not under the (correct) cup. It's under the (correct cup).

PROCEDURE The task consisted of two sessionsthe theory of mind task and videos, and the TONI and game. Non-autistic children were tested in two sessions separately, autistic children were tested in one session, except with siblings, where I ran one session with all siblings over two sessions.

SESSION ONE In the first session children were administered the theory of mind tasks, and then shown the videos. Before the videos, children were introduced to the puppets, as well as "Bonnie," a finger puppet. Children were told that, the puppet would speak first to Bonnie, and then to another puppet, and that they would be asked whether what the puppet said was the truth, a lie, or something else, and to put stars on sheets of paper representing each condition (green for true, brown for lie, yellow for something else. For lies and truth children were also asked to rate how

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true or how much of a lie it was. If it was just maybe true or maybe a lie they gave it one star, a little bit true or a little bit of a lie, they gave it two stars, and really really true or really really a lie, they gave it three stars. Two practice videos (in which a puppet said the sky is blue or the grass is red, with asides stating the sky is blue and the grass is green), were administered first to make sure children understood the task.

SESSION TWO In the second session children were administered the TONI, and then played the game with puppets. Children were always filmed during the game. Children were asked to close their eyes, and the experimenter hid a sticker under one of the cups, and then shuffled them. In two practice sessions, in which the children were introduced to the puppets, and we explained the game, telling the children that they would have to pick a puppet to ask, and that the puppets would not always tell the truth, but they could look under any cup they wanted. The four puppets were randomly divided into two pairs, in which both puppets said where the sticker was located. If the children looked under the wrong cup, we showed them where the sticker was actually hidden. After this, children played six rounds of the game, with each combination of puppets. Children were not told where the sticker was actually hidden in this part unless they asked.

CODING

THEORY OF MIND TASKS The theory of mind tasks were rated on a twelve-point scale. One point was assigned for

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each correct answer, and each correct explanation. An explanation that described thinking or knowing, or that referred to an original belief was rated as correct only if the child got the answer right. All other explanations were rated as incorrect.

VIDEOS Childrens' ratings of each video was based on the stars they assigned. A rating of "Something else" was given a rating of 0, while responses rated as true were rated as 1-3 (maybe true-really really true), and reponses rated as lies were rated as (-1)-(-3).

TONI All children scored at least one level above the supposed average for their age. Rather than normalize the results, I used the raw scores in my regressions.

GAME Children were rated on two dimensions on the gamewhich puppet they picked, and, for all except the quantity violatorwhether they listened to the puppet. For convenience, doing the opposite of what the ironic violator said was rated as listening to the puppet, vs chosing the cup recommended by the non-violator and liar.

DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS

ANALYSIS: VIDEO TASK

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I assessed children's performance on the video task through use of one-way ANOVAs. In the first set of ANOVAs, I lumped together four sets of videos with common parameters for truth or falsity, namely:

Table 1.11: False Conditions for 3 Way Comparison

ACTUALLY FALSE Prototypical lie: Prototypical irony: Accidental lie: Honest mistake: 0F 1F 2F 0F 1F 2T 0F 1T 2F 0F 1T 2T

BELIEVES FALSE Prototypical lie: Prototypical irony: Accidental truth: Mistaken irony: 0F 1F 2F 0F 1F 2T 0T 1F 2F 0T 1F 2T

BELIEVES LISTENER BELIEVES FALSE Prototypical lie: Accidental lie: Double bluff: Accidental truth: 0F 1F 2F 0F 1T 2F 0T 1T 2F 0T 1F 2F

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Table 1.12: True Conditions for 3 Way Comparison

ACTUALLY TRUE Accidental truth: Mistaken irony: Double bluff: Prototypical truth: 0T 1F 2F 0T 1F 2T 0T 1T 2F 0T 1T 2T

BELIEVES TRUE Accidental lie: Honest mistake: Double bluff: Prototypical truth: 0F 1T 2F 0F 1T 2T 0T 1T 2F 0T 1T 2T

BELIEVES LISTENER BELIEVES TRUE Prototypical irony: Honest mistake: Prototypical truth: Mistaken irony: 0F 1F 2T 0F 1T 2T 0T 1T 2T 0T 1F 2T

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Table 1.13: Summary Data for 3 Way comparison Mean ST Dev 0F -1.29 1.11 0T 1.43 1.09 1F -0.46 0.76 1T 0.59 0.97 2F 0 0.89 2T 0.14 0.78

For the three way comparison of false conditions, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that the effect of level of belief was significant, F(2,69) = 11.87, p < .01, and that children seemed to prefer fact over belief, and belief about fact over intent. Post hoc T tests of each set of groups indicated that the differences between fact and belief were significant (both p < .01), but that the differences between beliefs approached, but were not significant (p = .06). For the three way comparison of true conditions, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that the effect of level of belief was significant, F (2, 69) = 11.24, p < .01, and that children seemed to fact over belied, and belief about fact over intent. Post hoc T tests of each set of groups indicated that the differences between fact and belief were significant (both p < .01), but that the differences between beliefs approached, but were not significant (p = .08).

Additionally, because children had found several of my examples confusing, I removed Irony, Double Bluff, Mistaken Irony, and Accidental Lie. Belief about facts and belief about the beliefs of others collapsed in on each other, and I ran an analysis of belief vs. actuality, without the problematic examples. Because this is a two way comparison, I ran the results as the T-Test

Table 1.21: False Condition for Simplified Comparison Actually true

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Prototypical truth: Accidental truth:

AT BT AT BF

Believes true Prototypical truth: Honest mistake: AT BT AF BT

Table 1.22: True Condition for Simplified Comparison Actually true Prototypical lie: Honest mistake: AF BF AF BT

Believes true Accidental truth: Prototypical lie: AT BF AF BF

Table 1.23: Summary Data for two-way comparison Mean STDev AF -1.15 1.59 AT 1.17 1.17 BF -0.58 1.32 BT 0.60 1.38

Table 1.24: AT vs BT (p = .13) For the comparison of AF to BF, being actually false (M = -1.15 SD = 1.59) had a significantly greater effect than the character believing the statement false. (M = -0.58, SD =

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1.32), t(46) = -2.04, p < .05. For the comparison of AT to BT, being actually true (M = 1.17, SD = 1.17) appeared to have a greater effect than the character believing the statement to be true (M = 0.60, SD = 1.38), but these differences were not statistically significant t(46) = .71, p = .48.

With p values < .01 in both of the three-way tests, these differences are highly significant. The two way tests are less clear, with a significant effect on comparisons of falsity, but the data is smaller and they mirror the three way results. Notably, children tend to rank the actual state of affairs above belief about facts, and belief about facts about belief about belied. In the two-way test, children still rate the actual state of affairs over belief about facts, though these differences are no longer statistically significant

STRENGTH OF RESPONSE While conducting the experiment, I noticed that autistic children seemed much less inclined to give ratings of 1 or 2 than non-autistic children. I averaged the absolute values of all the responses for both groups, and ran a t-test to compare.

Table 1.3: T Test for strength of response. Mean STDev P Value Autistic 2.193181818 1.153285706 0.177203543 Non-Autistic 2.038461538 1.148431407

ANALYSIS: PUPPET GAME In the puppet game, I compare two factors: children's choice of puppets, and whether children

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listen to the irony violator, the quality violator, and the non-violator. "Listening," for the purpose of analysis, means choosing the cup that the Quantity violator or non-violator suggests, and choosing the cup that the irony violator says not to pick.

CHOICE OF PUPPETS First, to see if there is an overall difference in choice of puppets, I gave each child four scores from 0-3, the number of times they had picked each puppet, and ran an ANOVA. I expected that cumulatively, the Non Violator would have the highest count, followed by the irony violator, the quantity violator, and then the quality violator.

Table 2.11: Summary data (per child) from ANOVA for Puppet Choice (p =.28) Groups IRON QUAL QUAN NONV Count 23 23 23 23 Sum 36 30 31 41 Average 1.56 1.30 1.35 1.78 Variance 0.98 0.77 0.96 0.72

Surprisingly, while the pattern was exactly as I predicted, with F(3, 88) = 1.3 and p = .28, the results were not significant. Nevertheless, I noticed in coding that autistic children seemed less prone to pick the liar, and compared the autistic and non-autistic children. I thus ran both an ANOVA (p = .81) and a Chi squared (X2 = 1.26, p = .87) test comparing the responses.

Table 2.12: Summary data for puppet choice (all children) Autistic Non-Autistic IRON 19 19 QUAL 11 18 QUAN 14 15 NONV 20 20

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Table 2.13: Summary data for ANOVA Autistic/Non Autistic (p = .81) Groups IRON QUAL QUAN NONV Count 36 30 31 41 Sum 18 12 15 21 Average 0.5 0.4 0.48 0.51 Variance 0.26 0.25 0.26 0.25

TRUST IN PUPPET REPSONSES Rather surprisingly, I found that children listened to the ironic puppet (or rather explicitly disregarded her instructions), the nonviolator, and the liar equally often, with a P of .77 Table 2.2: Trust in Puppets Groups IRON NONV QUAL Count 36 41 30 Sum 23 28 18 Average 0.64 0.68 0.6 Variance 0.24 0.22 0.25

REGRESSION Of the factors I tested, only the ratings of videos produces statistically significant results. To determine the factors involved, I used the General Linear Model feature in MiniTab to run a regression for each factor independently. I looked at four factors: Age, raw TONI-II score, Theory of Mind task score, and whether or not the child was autistic (I did not examine the effects of sex, which was closely tied to autism status).. Because TONI and TOM and Age and Autism were highly correlated, MiniTab would not allow me to run them together, and my software experience was insufficient to address this. I aggregated all my data for two analyses: all two three-way comparisons, and all two-way comparisons. I expected adjusted r squared to 29

be reduced as a result of this large data set. I used the effect of the column the data came from (Type), as a reference point. Unsurprisingly, Type was statistically significant, and highly

correlated with children's rankings. And as I had predicted, Autism had no effect on its own. Neither, surprisingly did age, although TONI was the only factor I looked at statistically significant for both the two and three way comparison.

Table 3: Regression Comparison of all adj r square Sets p val nd Without 2 Order adj r square Comparisons p val TONI 0.0096 0.366 0.1195 0.036 TOM 0 0.6 0.0257 0.248 DISCUSSION In the videos, I had expected to find that there were differences between autistic and nonautistic childrenthat autistic children would tend to place a higher weight on facts than on belief, even when age and IQ were accounted for, and I expected to find that these differences would disappear when theory of mind was taken into account. I found that even initially, whether a child was autistic or not, and more surprisinglyage, had no bearing on how a child responded. Where differences in the ratings of the videos could be explained by a model it could be explained by TONI and TOM scores. However these variables were fairly insignificant in comparison to individual differences, and even given the differences in age, there was no statistically significant difference in the weight children placed on various factors in rating the videos at the outset. In the games, I had expected that children would prefer the nonviolator over the ironic Age 0 0.824 0 0.649 Autistic 0 0.924 0 0.573 Type 0.431 0 0.2958 0

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violator, the ironic violator over the quantity violator, and quantity violator over quality violator. Though this other major hypotheses seemed to be born out by the trend of the data, none of them were statistically significant. While I was surprised that children listened to the non-violator and violator and disregarded the ironic violator about equally, this makes a certain degree of sense, since the liar answered at random. One feature that I noticed, is that autistic children tend to be much more reluctant to call any of the examples from the video something else, or to call something a little bit true or a little bit of a lie. Either they were uncertain, but leaning one way, or it was true or a lie, and that is all there is to it. This seems to represent the known autistic tendency to see things in black and white. Though my sample of autistic children with second-order theory of mind is insufficient, to prove this conclusively, the data seems to be trending in that direction. It thus seems that the rigidity of autistic children is a factor quite independent of understanding other minds, that may govern understanding of maxims. This seems to fit the heuristic hypothesis, and in addition to a continuation of this study, a study of false belief tasks on the model designed by Fabricius may also be worth pursuing.

PROBLEMS AND REVISIONS I had trouble narrowing my focus when designing this experiment. Owing to my

obsession with the idea of a spectrum of transparency, I allowed myself to be distracted from the main purpose of my experimentto demonstrate that differences in interpretation of pragmatic violations between autistic and non-autistic groups can be explained by theory of mind. However, I tried to establish a new framework, and as it turned out, autistic and non-autistic children appear to intepret my stimuli roughly the same. It is possible that I simply needed a

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larger sample size, but there are several other issues that I would want to address. If I were to continue with this study, I aim for a much larger sample size with a greater age range. Moreover I would use an up-to-date nonverbal IQ test, and make several corrections the remaining three tasks. In addition to the small sample size, both of our original tasks, the videos and games suffered numerous flaws, to be described below. Beyond this, both the theory of mind tasks and TONI were also worrying. Children, almost without exception, scored at least two levels above where they are supposed to on the TONI. Because of the Flynn Effect (need cite), IQ rises over time, and needs to be corrected. Although we normalized the results, the non-autistic children were largely children of professors attending expensive schools, and likely benefited from this environment. Data about the socioeconomic status of either group is not available, and we cannot say how much this played a part. More troubling were the theory of mind tasks. Children made several common errors which might have decreased their score. They often failed first order theory of mind the first time, and passed it the second time. In the birthday story, several children seemed, from their explanations, to interpret the redundant question as a second order theory of mind question about what Jack believes his father believes, rather than a first order question about Jack's belief. The memory constraints of the task make it possible that children underperformed. However because the tasks were the most time intensive, and also least interesting for the children, we only used two. When children got second order theory of mind in one task but fail it in the other, it is therefore not clear whether the child does not fully have second order theory of mind, or the failure is merely due to executive function. Though the task includes both first and second order theory of mind, the coding method recommended for theory of mind tasks does not distinguish

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first and second order theory of mind. Were I to repeat this study, I would substantially modify the theory of mind tasks. I would make videos, including the three standardized theory of mind storiesthe bake sale, the birthday, and feeding ducks, as well as a third task, the ice cream truck task, not included in the suite of stories we used. Videos would be both more engaging, and remove some of the constraints on memory imposed by exposition.

The videos suffered from numerous problems. I tried to make the ironic conditions absurd, but they were seen as straightforward lies, moreso than the actual lying condition, while the double bluff was seen as truth. Without a motive, it appears that irony may be irreproducible, but indicating a motive is difficult, and introduces a higher cognitive load. Moreover, it was not clear that children understood that the aside was really an aside or that what the puppet said to Bonnie they believed to be true. And in the accident scenarios, there was some ambiguity about who was actually responsible for the accident, and the actual belief of the mother. For the videos, I would remove the scenariosIrony, where the statement has to be absurd, and Mistaken Irony, and Double Bluff, where the reality must be absurd, as well as Accidental Lie, which is a mistaken Double Bluff. For the remaining conditions: Truth, Lie, Honest Mistake, and Accidental Truth, I would ask children priming questions about the actuality, speaker belief about facts, and listener belief, though not about speaker belief about listener belief, to confirm that they understand the details of the scenario. These would be similar to expanded theory of mind tasks: "Did the dog actually spill the milk?" "Does Sally think that the dog spilled the milk?" "Who does Sally's mother think spilled the milk."

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My largest concerns with the games is that the initial practice session and six trials is insufficient to familiarize the children with the nature of the puppets. There were a few cases where children seemed to confuse the Quality violator and non-violator, and it often took until near they end before some children picked up on the fact that the irony violator was realiably wrong (at which point they often laughed). Since irony and ambiguity tend to be distinctive and lying is hidden, I feel that this is reflective of reality, but there seems to have been a steep learning curve. Moreover, children also preferred the quantity violator to a surprising degree. Several children laughed at the quantity violator's response, and it is possible that they kept choosing the quantity violator out of surprise and humor. Moreover, the nature of the quality violator was ambiguous. I could have had the quality violator give one cup every time, and stick to it, or I could have had the quantity violator indicate one of the two cups that the sticker was not under every time. By having the puppet answer at random, the nature of the violation was less clear, though it also might have been a better example for practice. Further, the puppets all looked rather similar, and some children appeared to confuse the two puppets in denim, distinguished mainly by their hair. Were I to repeat the puppet sessions, I would run more trials. I might run each child with only two or three puppets, allowing only two or three combinations of puppets, rather than the six that are possible with four, and giving children more experience with the individual puppets. I would also have both the liar and the truth teller declare the sticker to be "definitely" under x cup, hopefully making their responses more salient than the ironic puppet (with whom I already sometimes used "definitely") The biggest disappointment is that I have not really tested my theory about transparency of violations, and I find it difficult to see how I could do this satisfactorily. To support this, I would

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need to show that children prefer irony over teasing, teasing over white lies to clearly demonstrate that children understand these situations as irony, teasing, and lying. I would also want to try to distinguish sarcasm, dissembling, and lies, which might lie at slightly different points on my transparency spectrum than their counterparts, but are also greatly distinguished not just by knowledge, but by intent, being more self-serving than their counterparts. Such an experiment is doable, but would require me to start entirely from scratch in experimental design, as it is clear to me that my current experiment, and modifications thereof, cannot really test it.

FUTURE STUDIES There are many of directions I could go were I to continue this line of inquiry, however I would first want to put my own observations of firmer footingto demonstrate that the few effects I observed are real, and determine other effects I might have missed. The revised version of this study would be more focused, as described above, I would ask several questions about the children's beliefs about the actual state of affairs and about the puppets' beliefs. I would require a larger sample size to support this specialization. Moreover, a revised study could include expanded theory of mind tasks modeled on Fabricius's, to distinguish between heuristic usage and actual theory of mind, and determine whether this distinction can, in fact, account for the differences in assessments of the scenario videos, which in their more focused, expanded state, are close to theory of mind tasks themselves. The revised study excludes irony, except, ambiguously, in the game, however there are other ways I could try to assess irony, perhaps with tasks similar to those used by Happe or Bernicot. From my experience with this experiment, I would want to avoid wholesale

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modifications to either method, however performing Happe's task in conjunction with Fabricius's expanded theory of mind task and my own video ratings could help me assess whether the distinction in interpretation of irony between autistic and non-autistic children can be accounted for by heuristic usage or a didactic worldview. This would certainly necessitate adding a third session, requiring multiple sessions even for home visits, and be a much greater undertaking than my own study. However my own work has lead me to believe that such a study could shed some light on questions I have touched on tangentially.

Appendix A: Chart of violations

Appendix B: Latin Square for Stimuli

Appendix C: Script

Appendix D: Data

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