All the world’s a stage: Evaluation of two stages of metaphor comprehension in people with autism spectrum disorder

Can you tell it by the prime? A study of metaphorical priming in high‐functioning autism in comparison with matched controls

“…The processing advantage for novel metaphors makes sense also for the highly verbal participants with ASD in our sample, given that they are very good compositionalists and are able to read‐off meaning directly from the constituents of the expression. The findings in Chouinard and Cummine () lend further support to this idea in that the participants with high‐functioning autism did not have problems in generating literal or metaphorical interpretations, but rather seemed to experience a difficulty in suppressing the unintended meaning. Also participants with autism can be trained to process (novel) metaphors based on exemplars (Persicke et al .…”

“…However, the absence in the other groups of a difference in response latency between the two prime‐target relation conditions suggests that both children and participants with ASD are not (yet) sensitive to the difference in semantic relatedness. This may imply that these participants do not detect the figurative nature of the metaphor prime or, alternatively, that they cannot select the appropriate interpretation, as suggested by Chouinard and Cummine ().…”

“…A recent study suggests that there is no problem per se in the accuracy of metaphor interpretation in individuals with autism with adequate structural language skills compared with matched peers. Chouinard and Cummine () investigated whether processing of metaphorical and non‐metaphorical sentences in individuals with ASD is the same as, or different from, individuals without ASD. Thirteen high‐functioning (NVIQs > 80) individuals with ASD (10 male; ages 16–49) and 12 TD peers (eight male; ages 19–50) matched on chronological age, non‐verbal IQ, semantic knowledge, and expressive syntax were recruited.…”

“…The findings support the claim that there are processing differences, rather than inability to understand metaphors. Thus, the problem is of a processing nature and resides in difficulties in selecting the appropriate figurative meaning over the literal one (Chouinard and Cummine ).…”

Syntax and Morphology in Danish-Speaking Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…First, in research studies, vocabulary tests are often used as a proxy for overall language level, e.g., when matching groups. If the vocabulary skills of children with ASD constitute a peak within their language skills, then choosing vocabulary as the matching parameter will, all things being equal, give children with ASD a disadvantage in language comprehension or production relative to the comparison sample (Mervis and KleinTasman 2004;Mottron 2004;Tsai and Beisler 1984), as in, for example, studies of narrative skills (Tager-Flusberg and Sullivan 1995) or metaphor comprehension (Chouinard and Cummine 2016). Secondly, in clinical practice, it is important to assess a child's language level when planning and evaluating intervention; currently, many clinicians rely heavily on vocabulary scores as an index of overall language development.…”