On acquiring a complex personal reference system: experimental results from Thai children with autism

Reference of pronouns may be constrained via lexical presuppositions, includingmarked F-features, implicated presuppositions, and deictic center shifting in certain languages.This paper explores the acquisition of personal reference terms in Thai, a language that hasa highly complex personal reference system. The participants of the study were 67 typicallydevelopingchildren (TD) and 29 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), a populationwhich has long been observed to have difficulties with pronouns. The children were asked tocomplete simple production and comprehension tasks on personal reference terms. Overall,ASD children performed on par in production but significantly poorer in comprehension thanTD children. Given the freedom of choice in the production task, ASD children preferred usingfixed referential terms for self-reference, whereas TD children opted for personal pronouns. Interms of comprehension, ASD children were shown to generally be able to detect the personfeatures but they seemed to struggle the most with the pragmatic aspects of personal referenceterms. Our results support previous literature that lexical presuppositions are acquiredearlier than implicated presuppositions. We add to the literature that the types or the amount ofimplicated presuppositions matter in acquisition.Keywords: implicated presupposition, pragmatic inference, pronoun, personal reference, acquisition,deixis, Thai