Abstract
In a study involving 62 Danish children with autism spectrum disorder, we obtained results showing that the mastery of linguistic recursion is a significant predictor of success in second-order false belief tasks. The same study also showed that the mastery of linguistic recursion was not significantly correlated with success in a task involving three heavily used Danish discourse particles. This calls for further explanation, as the reasoning involved in both types of tasks seems similar. In this paper, we discuss second-order false belief reasoning, the reasoning underlying the use of the three Danish discourse particles, say what we know about them experimentally, and discuss what they do (and don’t) have in common.
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Notes
- 1.
The Tower of Hanoi problem is on how to transfer a stack of disks, one disk at a time, from one location to another, with the help of a third (intermediate) location. The disks are all of different sizes, and the key rule is that a bigger disk may never be placed on a smaller one. The problem can be solved elegantly (for any number of disks) by a simple recursive program. YouTube has many good videos illustrating how this works.
- 2.
For a more detailed discussion of compositionality and the structure of the syntax-semantics interface, see Szabó (2013).
- 3.
As far as we are aware, the relation between recursive embedding in language and second-order false belief reasoning has been the focus of only a handful of previous studies (see Arslan et al. (2017), de Villiers et al. (2014), Hollebrandse (2008), Bogaerds-Hazenberg and Hendriks (2016)). All these studies investigate typically developing children, and to the best of our knowledge, ours is the first to experimentally investigate the relationship between recursion in language and recursive reasoning for children with ASD.
- 4.
As we mentioned earlier, the main reason that not all of our 62 subjects took the JDV test is that it is a written test; not all our subjects had the required reading/writing skills to take it.
- 5.
The focus of Engberg-Pedersen and Thomsen (2016) is the matching study, and they only mention in passing a few exclusively ASD results, namely positive correlations for JDV with grammar comprehension, with verbal comprehension, and with nonverbal cognitive abilities. They also mention that: “The children were also given two false belief tests, one of location change and one of unexpected contents with altogether three questions about beliefs,” but no statistical results are given (Engberg-Pedersen and Thomsen (2016, p. 9)).
- 6.
Note that SRS does not correlate significantly with the other variables either, and that SRS is rather different from the other variables in that SRS is filled out by the children’s teachers.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the funding received from the Velux Foundation for the project Hybrid-Logical Proofs at Work in Cognitive Psychology (Velux 33305). All three authors would like to thank Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen and Ditte Boeg Thomsen for permission to use the JDV test and for stimulating discussions of JDV, ASD, and perspective taking. We’d also like to thank the three anonymous referees of the paper for their detailed comments. Irina Polyanskaya presented an early version of RET at the Language Acquisition and Ageing Lab, University of Groningen, and would like to thank Angeliek van Hout, Bart Hollebrandse, Fransizka Koder, Petra Hendriks, Rineke Verbrugge, and Burçu Arslan for their valuable feedback. Irina would also like to thank Inge-Marie Eigsti for hosting her at the University of Connecticut and for her extremely helpful discussions on many aspects of the work reported here. Special thanks also to Ida Aaen who carried out the bulk of the testing. Finally, a big thank you to all the children and adults who agreed to be tested, and the teachers and parents who let it happen.
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Blackburn, P., Braüner, T., Polyanskaya, I. (2021). Linguistic Recursion and Danish Discourse Particles: Language in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In: Amblard, M., Musiol, M., Rebuschi, M. (eds) (In)coherence of Discourse. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71434-5_2
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