These online surveys are designed to measure pragmatic competence on several dimensions. We created two versions of each task to ensure that the measurements are stable across modalities. Feel free to take the surveys, but note that your answers will not be recorded.

Metaphors: distinguishing metaphors and literal phrases
Version 1 – Reading
Version 2 – Visual

Jokes: recognizing the punchline to a joke
Version 1 – Reading
Version 2 – Visual

Irony: understanding different forms of irony
Version 1 – Reading
Version 2 – Visual

Indirect Speech: recognizing the real meaning behind an indirect response
Version 1 – Reading
Version 2 – Visual

Deceits: knowing what’s going through a speaker’s mind when it’s impolite to tell the truth
Version 1 – Reading
Version 2 – Visual

Contrastive Prosody: understanding how tone of voice reflects a speaker’s meaning
Version 1 – Female voice
Version 2 – Male voice

Emotional Prosody: recognizing the emotion portrayed in a speaker’s voice
Version 1 – Voice to text
Version 2 – Voice to facial expression

Maxims: understanding why people may violate certain conversational maxims
Version 1 – Reading
Version 2 – Visual

Gestures: linking physical gestures to meaning
Version 1 – Reading
Version 2 – Visual

Inferences: recognizing logical links between consecutive events
Version 1 – Reading
Version 2 – Visual

Pragmatics and Autism

Comprehending language requires a certain level of pragmatic competence—or the ability to understand another speaker’s intended meaning based on context. When you’re sitting at the dinner table and your friend says, “Can you pass the salt?” you know that she is making a request rather than inquiring about your physical capability of performing the action. Pragmatic reasoning takes on many forms, as indicated by the list of tasks above.

Performance on such pragmatic tasks may be linked to traits associated with the autism spectrum. In a project led by Olessia Jouravlev, we are correlating the measurements obtained from the Battery of Pragmatics Tasks with assessments of autistic traits, such as the Autism Spectrum Quotient. Please note that the tasks on this site are still in development are not meant to be diagnostic (i.e. they are not designed to test whether or not a person has autism).