Comparing pragmatic abilities across multiple languages in adults with ADHD: Insights from a self-report questionnaire.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is associated with pragmatic language impairments in children, but less is known about the communicative abilities of adults with ADHD, especially when using a second or third language. In this study, we developed a questionnaire to collect self-report measures of a set of pragmatic skills in a person's first, second and third language, comparing adults with and without an ADHD diagnosis. One hundred seventy-nine multilingual adults with (N = 91) and without ADHD (N = 88) completed the survey. As predicted, adults with ADHD reported more pragmatic difficulties than the control group. More specifically, people with ADHD showed pronounced impairments in regulating their behaviour in spoken interactions in the form of excessive talking, frequently interrupting others, and speaking without thinking first. Notably, these types of hyperactive and impulsive behaviours were significantly reduced when people with ADHD communicated in a second or third language. For pragmatic difficulties related to inattention such as concentrating on a conversation, both groups tended to be more inattentive in their third language compared to their first and second language. The understanding of non-literal language was only affected by ADHD in the first language and was generally more taxing in a language with lower proficiency levels. Our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how ADHD affects different kinds of communicative abilities in multilingual adults. It also has implications for clinical practice, highlighting the importance of assessing symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity in a person's dominant language.

The effects of bilingualism on cognition and behaviour in individuals with attention deficits: A scoping review.

Background: Weaknesses in executive function have persistently been found to be associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), while bilinguals have been argued to show advantages in executive functions. While there has been some research into how bilingualism affects cognitive skills and behaviour in individuals with attention deficits, the question is still very much open. The aim of this systematic review is to gather, synthesise and evaluate existing evidence on how bilingual language experience and attention deficits affect executive function performance and ADHD-related symptoms in children and adults. Methods: Following PRISMA guidelines, a comprehensive literature search in relevant databases (PsycInfo, PubMed, Scopus, ERIC, Web of Science, EMBASE, MEDLINE, LLBA) was performed using search strings related to attention difficulties/ADHD and bilingualism. All quantitative studies were included that presented original empirical data on the combined effects of bilingualism and attention levels, regardless of age group and methodology. The screening procedure revealed nine relevant studies. Results: Across the nine identified studies, a total of 2071 participants were tested. Of these, seven studies involved children and two adults. The studies varied considerably with respect to their design and methodology, the targeted executive function skills or behavioural symptoms, as well as their measure of bilingualism and attention levels. Most studies assessed aspects of executive function performance such as interference control, response inhibition, working memory or cognitive flexibility. Three studies looked at the effects of bilingualism on ADHD-related symptoms or ADHD diagnosis. Across the studies, no systematic advantage or disadvantage of bilingualism on cognitive performance or behaviour in people with attention deficits was observed. Conclusion: The limited number of identified studies provide no consistent evidence that bilingualism alleviates or intensifies attention difficulties in adults or children with ADHD. Based on the current state of research, individuals with ADHD and their families should not be concerned that learning additional languages has a negative impact on functioning or cognitive performance. Systematic review registration: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PK768.

Irony and Perspective-Taking in Children: The Roles of Norm Violations and Tone of Voice.

In order to understand most, if not any communicative act, the listener needs to make inferences about what the speaker intends to convey. This perspective-taking process is especially challenging in the case of nonliteral uses of language such as verbal irony (e.g., "Thanks for your help!" uttered to someone who has not provided the expected support). Children have been shown to have difficulties with the comprehension of irony well into the school years, but the factors that hamper or facilitate children's perspective-taking in irony comprehension are not well understood. This study takes as its starting point the relevance-theoretic echoic analysis of verbal irony, and focuses on two of irony's distinctive features as defined by this theory: (i) the normative bias and (ii) the characteristic tone of voice. In this study, we investigated the comprehension of irony in children aged 3-8. We manipulated these two factors, namely, the violation of different types of norms and the use of different tones of voice - to see how they affected children's processing and interpretation of irony. Using an irony comprehension task that combined picture selection and eye-tracking, we found that the type of norm violation affected 4-to 5-year-olds' offline understanding of irony, with a better performance on moral compared with social norm violations. Tone of voice had an effect on gaze behavior in adults, but not children, although a parodic, pretense-oriented tone of voice tended to lead to more looks to the angry compared with the happy emoticon at the offset of the ironical utterance, potentially facilitating children's irony understanding. Our results show that the understanding of irony can be detected on explicit measures around age 6 - with the emergence of second-order perspective-taking abilities - but that a sensitivity to some of irony's features can be detected several years earlier. Finally, our study provides a novel input to the debate on the existence of a so-called literal stage in pragmatic development, in particular regarding 3-year-olds' differential performance on the offline and online measures of irony understanding, suggesting that they are not naively mistaking ironical utterances for "ordinary" literal ones.

The advantage of story-telling: children's interpretation of reported speech in narratives.

Children struggle with the interpretation of pronouns in direct speech (Ann said, "I get a cookie"), but not in indirect speech (Ann said that she gets a cookie) (Köder & Maier, 2016). Yet children's books consistently favor direct over indirect speech (Baker & Freebody, 1989). To reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings, we hypothesize that the poor performance found by Köder and Maier (2016) is due to the information-transmission setting of that experiment, and that a narrative setting facilitates children's processing of direct speech. We tested 42 Dutch children (4;1-7;2) and 20 adults with a modified version of Köder and Maier's referent selection task, where participants interpret speech reports in an interactive story book. Results confirm our hypothesis: children are much better at interpreting pronouns in direct speech in such a narrative setting than they were in an information-transmission setting. This indicates that the pragmatic context of reports affects their processing effort.

Children mix direct and indirect speech: evidence from pronoun comprehension.

This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, "I get the football") and indirect speech (Elephant said that he gets the football), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we hypothesize that the direct-indirect distinction is acquired relatively late. We also predict more mistakes for third person pronouns compared to first and second person pronouns. We tested 136 Dutch-speaking children between four and twelve in a referent selection task and found that children interpret pronouns in direct speech predominantly as in indirect speech, supporting our hypothesis about a late acquisition of the direct-indirect distinction. In addition, we found differences between I, you, and he that deviate from a simple first and second vs. third person split. We discuss our results in the light of cross-linguistic findings of direct-indirect mixing.