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Not all inferences are created equal

“Get me a balloon,” a young patient requested.

I immediately walked over to the box of balloons.

“Green or red?” I asked.

He suddenly became angry.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, GREEN OR RED? WHAT’S THAT GOT TO DO WITH ANYTHING?!”

A little startled, I tried again.

“Would you like a green balloon or a red one?”

“Oh! Green,” he answered, visibly relieved.

Now consider another incident.

I once told a gifted autistic teenager that we would have to skip our next appointment because I was going away. Initially distressed by the unexpected change, he gradually calmed down and asked where I was going.

“The Seychelles,” I replied.

Then I added:

“I’ve known my husband since I was 19.”

“WHAT?! WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT? WHAT’S THAT GOT TO DO WITH ANYTHING?!”

He was visibly frustrated. But he hadn’t given me the chance to finish.

My next sentence would have been:

“Ever since then, he’s dreamed of traveling to the Seychelles.”

So, what went wrong?

For parents raising an autistic child, or anyone who spends considerable time with autistic people, these situations may sound familiar: an apparently harmless remark provokes an unexpectedly intense reaction. The listener becomes frustrated, perhaps even angry, while the speaker struggles to understand what went wrong.

In both incidents, my patients responded to something that seemed irrelevant or confusing. And in both, a surprisingly small amount of additional information was enough, or would have been enough, to establish the missing connection.

Yet the two situations are fundamentally different.

In the first incident, the listener needed to look backward. To make sense of my question, he needed to take it from the top, or, at the very least, consider the preceding utterance in which he had requested a balloon.

In the second incident, the listener needed to look forward. My statement about my husband seemed unrelated to our conversation about the Seychelles. But the missing connection was about to arrive. Understanding its relevance required allowing the conversation to unfold.

Neither incident, of course, tells us precisely why the difficulty occurred. Attention, expectations, emotional state, and language-processing demands are all possible considerations.

Still, they raise a question worth asking:

How wide is your window of interpretation?

When grammar depends on context

Consider two perfectly ordinary sentences:

“The hibiscus tea is rich in antioxidants.”

“It is also quite easy to make.”

Once we’ve introduced the hibiscus tea, we can refer to it using the pronoun it. Repeating the full expression would be grammatically acceptable, but usually unnecessary.

This is called anaphora: referring back to something already mentioned in a conversation or text. Such references contribute to discourse cohesion by connecting successive utterances.

Now try reversing the sentences:

“It is also quite easy to make.”

“The hibiscus tea is rich in antioxidants.”

Without any preceding context, we’re left wondering what it refers to.

The individual sentences haven’t changed. What has changed is the availability of the information needed to interpret them.

For some autistic individuals, establishing and maintaining such connections may present particular challenges. However, research indicates considerable variability in pronoun use and interpretation, so these difficulties shouldn’t be treated as universal characteristics of autism.

A listener may understand every word and every grammatical structure without necessarily integrating the information required to interpret the speaker’s message.

Understanding language, then, is not merely a matter of understanding individual sentences. It also requires connecting them, sometimes looking backward, sometimes looking forward, and sometimes taking it from the top.

The gist

Understanding a conversation often requires integrating information across multiple utterances. The information we need may already have been given, or it may still be on its way.

Not all pragmatic demands are identical, and not all autistic individuals experience the same difficulties.