OARacle Newsletter

In 2022, OAR awarded a graduate research grant to Faith Frost, who was pursuing her doctoral degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders at James Madison University. Her study, “Interpretation of Indirect Requests by Autistic Adults,” examined how autistic adults determine whether a statement could or should be interpreted as an indirect request, depending on context. That ability is important for successful communication.

As she noted in her proposal, conventionalized indirect requests, such as “Can you turn on the heater?” require little inference and are simple to understand. Research has shown autistic individuals respond to these types of requests similarly to their neurotypical peers. Non-conventionalized indirect requests, such as “It’s cold in here,” require the listener to infer what the listener means or wants. Does the speaker want the heat turned on or are they simply noting the temperature? Theory of Mind describes the ability to infer the mental states of others.

The study addressed two questions:

• • How do autistic adults compare to neurotypical adults in using context to interpret an utterance’s intention as either literal or a request?
  • What cognitive mechanisms correlate with indirect request interpretation, and are these different for participants in each group?

Methodology

Dr. Frost recruited 25 autistic and 23 neurotypical college students to engage in an online experiment in which they read narratives that ended with sentences that could be heard/read as either literal (such as “I’m really cold; it’s too bad the heater is broken”) or an embedded request (“Could you turn on the heater?”), based on context. After each narrative, participants identified if the sentence was literal or request.

Following this task, participants completed two Theory of Mind measures, a false-belief task and an emotion-identification task, and several executive-functioning tests. For the false-belief task, participants read three short stories and answered one or two false-belief questions after each. The false-belief questions assessed how participants attribute mental states to characters and use that information to predict other mental states and actions. The emotion-identification task, called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, required participants to identify mental states based on visual information from the eyes. The executive-functioning tests evaluated inhibition, attention shifting, and working memory.

Outcomes

This study investigated how autistic college students comprehend hints, which are indirect requests that do not contain the form or components of the underlying question. Results revealed that hint comprehension is similar for autistic and neurotypical college students, challenging the hypothesis that autistic adults would perform less accurately due to assumed lower Theory of Mind abilities. Frost and her research team surmised that the similar scores could be because the autistic group’s Theory of Mind skills are fully developed by adulthood.

Based on those findings, Frost and her research team recommended that future studies be conducted to understand how:

• Autistic adults at different educational levels determine whether a statement could or should be interpreted as an indirect request
• Autistic children would perform on this task compared to neurotypical children and whether cognitive mechanisms aside from Theory of Mind contribute to their understanding

Sherri Alms is the freelance editor of The OARacle, a role she took on in 2007. She has been a freelance writer and editor for more than 20 years.