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The present study investigates patterns of deficits in pragmatic competence in five autistic adolescents. Pragmatic competence relates to language use in context and represents an interface between social, cognitive, and linguistic development. Three areas of pragmatic deficits are discussed which cannot be accounted for by specific phonological, syntactic, or semantic deficits on the sentence level. These relate to impairment in speaker-hearer role relationship, impairment in rules of conduct governing a dialogue, and impairment in the foregrounding and backgrounding of information.
Christiane A. M. Baltaxe (1977) studied this question.