Embodied cognition and language: Aspectuality in autism

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that seems to mainly affect social cognition. The linguistic profile of subjects with autism shows some alterations in the use of aspectuality. The essay tries to highlight the social dimension of aspectuality by examining these alterations in patients. Firstly, it analyses literature that empirically investigates specific autistic alterations in the use of aspectuality. It then discusses two theoretical backgrounds of autism: the classical idea of lack in the Theory of Mind (Baron Cohen 1997) and the hypothesis of a deficit in the cognitive constructions of priors during perception (Pellicano and Burr 2012). Both approaches are discussed considering not just empirical data on autism, but also philosophical questions linked to the passage from the computationalist theories to the embodied cognition theories in cognitive sciences. The essay concludes that the coherent use of aspectuality-if analysed from the more ecological point of view of embodied cognition theories, rather than from the computationalist perspective-finds its aetiology in the social dimension of human cognition, rather that in the individual one. In fact, the fixation of reference (as well as that of temporal reference and of aspectuality) in a specific object of joint attention stems from the need to be understood, and not from the need to understand oneself. In non-conventional contexts such as dreams, indeed, aspectuality is frequently altered, despite the possibility for the subject to understand the object of temporal reference.