Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) has been described as a condition that presents, as one of its symptoms, deficiencies in discourse comprehension, particularly in the ability to make inferences. Two types of inferences essential for discourse comprehension are that of mental causation and that of physical causation. The first refers to people or characters and would be related to theory of mind (ToM) skills. The second refers to objects or events and would be linked to general skills of comprehension of the physical world. The present work compared the generation of inferences of mental and physical causation by a group of boys diagnosed with AS (N = 11) and a control group (N = 11), all of them between 12 and 15 years of age. To this end, a written test with texts whose understanding required inferring mental or physical causation was designed and applied. Four filter tests were administered: BLOC item syntax and Boston Test item complex ideational, to identify language disorders; Raven’s progressive matrix test, to evaluate general intelligence; and Faux Pas, to evaluate second-order ToM. The results showed no significant differences in inferential tasks between the SA group and the control group. There was also no significant difference between both types of inference in the SA group.
Keywords:
Síndrome de Asperger, Causación mental, Causación física, Teoría de la mente
Landea, D., Soto, G., & García, R. (2020). Inferences of mental causation and physical causation in children with Asperger Syndrome. Lenguas Modernas, (55), pp. 115–132. Retrieved from https://lenguasmodernas.uchile.cl/index.php/LM/article/view/58722
