Autismo e pragmatica clinica:dalla Teoria della Pertinenza alla Teoria della Motivazione Sociale

Autism and Clinical Pragmatics: from Relevance Theory to Social Motivation Theory. In this paper, we propose an interpretation of social deficits link to Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in a theoretic framework that combines Relevance Theory (RT, Sperber, Wilson 1996Wilson, Sperber 2002) to Social Motivation Theory (SMT, Dawson et al. 2002; Dawson et al. 2004b; Grelotti, Gauthier, Schultz 2002). Specifically, we will show that: in subjects with ASD, social deficits could be linked with an alteration of salience of perceptual stimuli, that impedes them intersubjectivity interaction based on cognitive mechanisms described in RT (§1); although two theories could constitute two different frameworks, it’s possible to think a relation between RT and SMT (§2); genetic (§3.1), behavioural (§3.3) evidences and neuroimaging studies (§3.2) on perception of environmental inputs and so- cio-communicatives abilities show, in subjects with ASD, different biases of salience of different kinds of stimuli.