Knowledge of Disjunction Across Downward-Entailing Contexts: Evidence from Mandarin-speaking 4–7-Year-old Autistic Children

While autistic children are often described as exhibiting semantic impairments, accumulating evidence suggests that some aspects of formal semantics may be relatively preserved. The present study investigated whether 4–7-year-old Mandarin-speaking autistic children compute the core semantic relations underlying logical expressions. Twenty-three autistic children and two typically developing (TD) control groups (23 age-matched and 28 language-matched), matched on nonverbal intelligence, completed two computer-based Truth Value Judgment Tasks assessing the interpretation of the disjunction huozhe (“or”) in two downward-entailing contexts involving the Mandarin negation meiyou (“not”) and the temporal conjunction zai…zhiqian (“before”). Results showed that autistic children exhibited interpretation patterns comparable to those of both TD control groups. Across the two tasks, all groups tended to assign a conjunctive interpretation to disjunction in downward-entailing contexts, demonstrating sensitivity to the scope relations between logical operators. These interpretation patterns were consistent with the principles of classical logic and the predictions of the Semantic Subset Principle. The findings suggest that autistic children with nonverbal intelligence scores in the average-to-above-average range retain core aspects of semantic knowledge and logical reasoning, challenging claims of pervasive semantic atypicality in autism and supporting a role for language-internal computational mechanisms in autistic language acquisition.