“It’s in your box!”––Personal pronoun comprehension in children with ASD

Personal pronouns have been argued to be challenging for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Pronoun comprehension includes (a) establishing the right mappings: first-person pronouns refer to the speaker, and second-person pronouns refer to the addressee; and (b) tracking referent shifts––identifying the speaker and addressee in the current round of conversation. The latter may require social-communicative sensitivity, which children ASD may have difficulty with. Here, we used a multi- converser setting to test pronoun understanding given referent shifts. Results show that both children with ASD and typically developing children know the semantic differences between first- and second-person pronouns, and they know that pronouns’ referents shift by discourse role. However, both groups are biased to interpret second- person pronouns as referring to themselves. TD children show similar patterns to the ASD group, despite better performance overall.