Neil Bowen, Swansea University, 2012 Critical Review 1 Happé, F. (1993). Communicative competence and theory of mind in autism: A test of relevance theory. Cognition, 48, 101-119. INTRODUCTION Happé presents an empirical investigation into how relevance theory - a theory of inferential communication that exploits the ability to recognize the intentions of others (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) – might be used to further understand the link between ostensive-inferential communication and theory of mind – an ability to attribute mental states to others (Premack & Woodruff, 1978) - in normal and autistic subjects. Through a battery of comprehension tests she aims to show that relevance theory can be used to predict the exact level of metarepresentation (theory of mind) required to comprehend three disparate types of literal/non-literal meaning: simile, metaphor and irony. In this light, the study seeks to contribute to first language acquisition research vis-à-vis development of communicative competence, more specifically pragmatic inference, in normal and atypical children. THE STUDY Happé carried out three experiments. Experiment (1.1) - ‘SIMILE VERSUS METAPHOR’ (synonym as control) - involved three groups of autistic adolescents (n=6) divided according to a trichotomy of theory of mind (henceforth ToM) abilities: those who failed pre-testing – no-ToM; those who could understand ‘false beliefs about the world’ – first-order ToM; those who could understand ‘false beliefs about beliefs’- Second-order ToM; and a control group (n=14), composed of adolescents with moderate learning difficulties (MLD) and matched for verbal IQ with the no-ToM group. Subjects were asked to complete five sentences for each of the three types: (1) Simile, which included the terms ‘as’ or ‘like’, for example, ‘The night sky was so clear. The stars were like… [diamonds] ’; (2) Metaphor, for example: ‘Ian was very clever and tricky. He really was… [a fox] ’; (3) Synonym, for example: ‘Sarah was so beautiful. She really was… [lovely] ’.