Preserved Perspective Taking in Free Indirect Discourse in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

ABSTRACT: Perspective taking has been proposed to be impaired in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially when implicit processing is required. In narrative texts, language perception and interpretation is fundamentally guided by taking the perspective of a narrator. We studied perspective taking in the linguistic domain of so-called Free Indirect Discourse (FID), during which certain text segments have to be interpreted as the thoughts or utterances of a protagonist without explicitly being marked as thought or speech representations of that protagonist (as in direct or indirect discourse). Crucially, the correct interpretation of text segments as FID depends on the ability to detect which of the protagonists "stands out" against the others and is therefore identifiable as imp

SUBMITTER: Zimmermann JT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8292616 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature