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The language of children with autism is usually delayed, and useful language may not develop at all.Even for the small portion of verbal individuals with autism, their speech is rigid and stereotypic.While syntactic and lexical aspects (form) of language in autism are preserved, the aspects of pragmatics (function) are frequently aberrant and disrupted.To remediate any pragmatic impairment, it is important to operationally define pragmatic language and then examine its plausible cognitive roots.The Pragmatic Rating Scale (PRS) which categorizes pragmatic language into 19 categories is one of the few that can be used in a semi-social setting.Using the PRS ratings as the dependent measure, three prevalent cognitive impairments were weighted for their power to predict pragmatic anomalies in autism.Based on data derived from a sample of 26 autism children and their 26 normal counterparts, results suggested that the autism group performed significantly less well than the normal group on measures of "theory of mind" ability and emotion perception.In addition, participants with autism failed on almost all (except inhibitory control) measures of executive function and "theory of mind" which are relatively pure frontal lobe measures.Bivariate correlation revealed that performances on these two domains portrayed a significant positive relationship with pragmatic capacity in the autism group.The multiple regression models illustrated that executive function stood out as the best predictor of pragmatic competence, although "theory of mind" was also strongly implicated.Emotion perception ability turned out to be least informative regarding pragmatic competence.