# Autistic Individuals Are Flexible with Physical and Emotion Gradable Adjectives

## TL;DR

The study found that autistic adolescents can adjust their understanding of gradable adjectives like 'long' or 'happy' based on context, similar to typically developing peers.

## Contribution

This is the first study to investigate how individuals with autism interpret gradable adjectives and their sensitivity to contextual changes.

## Key findings

- Both autistic and typically developing adolescents adjusted their interpretation of gradable adjectives based on context.
- Better language skills in autistic individuals were linked to maintaining rather than shifting cutoffs for emotional adjectives.
- Autistic traits did not influence how either group adjusted their interpretations.

## Abstract

Gradable adjectives (long, happy) differ from absolute adjectives (spotted) in that they are dependent on context and speaker/listener perspective for their interpretation. Such context sensitivity may present challenges for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, this has never been investigated for these linguistic elements. In the current study, we asked adolescents with ASD or typical development (TD), who were part of a larger longitudinal study in which autistic characteristics, nonverbal cognition (NVIQ), and standardized language were also assessed, to sort pictures whose properties were either gradable or absolute. Adolescents sorted pictures on two occasions. In the second sorting, we manipulated the context by adding images representing one end of the scale to induce a shift in interpretation. Contrary to prediction, both groups demonstrated sensitivity to the context-specific properties by shifting their cutoffs of what counted as ‘long’ or ‘happy’ when the array was changed. Whereas NVIQ correlated positively with physical property shifts for the TD group, language measures correlated negatively with emotion property shifts for the ASD group. Autistic characteristics were not related to shift patterns in either group. Adolescents with autism are clearly able to take context into account when interpreting gradable adjectives; however, those with better language seem more focused on maintaining their cutoffs more than shifting them.