Autistic Children's Talk about Mental states at School and Home: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Currently, experimental research has offered evidence that there is a minority of individuals with high-functioning autism who perform successfully on advanced theory of mind tests (Baron-Cohen 1989, Bowler 1992; Happe 1994; Ozonoff, Pennington and Rogers 1991a, 1991b). On the other hand, naturalistic research suggests that children with high-functioning autism are 'noticeably deficient' in their ability to talk about cognitive mental states at home (Tager-Flusberg 1992). Nevertheless, this naturalistic study examined exclusively the autistic child's mental state language, without paying attention to issues related to the interaction between the child and others. It also has to be noted that this study did not examine whether or not these children showed a basic theory of mind ability in a test setting. This leaves unanswered the question of whether high-functioning autistic persons with basic theory of mind abilities still have persisting problems in real life situations?