Different Factors Predict Idiom Comprehension in Children and Adolescents with ASD and Typical Development

Saban-Bezalel, Ronit; Mashal, Nira

doi:10.1007/s10803-019-04193-9

Cited by 17 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…However, it is important to note that all APACS participants were 19 years old or older. Previous studies have found positive correlation between idiom comprehension and age, for TD children and adolescents (Saban-Bezalel and Mashal, 2019). In addition, it was found that the described correlation was mediated by executive functions among the TD participants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

“…Theory of Mind (ToM) skills were measured by a Hebrew translated version of the Hinting test (Saban-Bezalel and Mashal, 2019). The test includes ten brief stories describing social interaction between two characters and a social "hint" by one of them.…”

Section: Theory Of Mindmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This task assesses the ability to infer non-literal meanings by providing a verbal explanation to idioms, novel and familiar metaphors and proverbs. Stimuli were selected from previous studies (Mashal and Kasirer, 2011;Saban-Bezalel and Mashal, 2019). After each sentence is read to the participant, he is required to explain it (for example: wolf in sheep's clothing).…”

Section: Task 5: Humormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, the CCC is restricted to children aged 4-16 years and cannot be used to assess adolescents' and adults' pragmatic skills. As far as pragmatic comprehension, there are few questionnaires assessing the ability in infer non-literal meanings to idioms, proverbs, novel and familiar metaphors (Mashal and Kasirer, 2011;Saban-Bezalel and Mashal, 2019). However, these questionnaires do not assess pragmatic production nor narrative or humor comprehension.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Initial Validation for the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS) Hebrew Battery in Adolescents and Young Adults With Typical Development

Fussman

Mashal

2022

Front. Commun.

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Currently there is no validated battery to assess pragmatic abilities in Hebrew. The use of such battery has great importance, as it may provide norms to the assessment of impaired pragmatic skills across several populations, such as ASD, schizophrenia, specific learning disorders and intellectual disabilities. In order to validate the battery, the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS) was translated to Hebrew. The APACS battery was previously validated and found high reliability and validity for ages 19–89 years. The battery includes six tasks, focusing on two main domains: pragmatic production and pragmatic comprehension. The assessment of pragmatic production will be conducted by the use of interview and description tasks, whereas pragmatic comprehension will be assessed by narratives, two figurative language, and humor tasks. The translated battery, APACS-Heb is currently the most comprehensive and the first validated battery for pragmatic tests in Hebrew. Forty Hebrew-speaking adolescents ages 16–20 participated in the study. All participants performed screening tests assessing vocabulary, Theory of Mind and social responsiveness. In addition, the validity and test-retest reliability of APACS-Heb were assessed. Furthermore, the effect of vocabulary, Theory of Mind and social responsiveness on performance was evaluated. High internal consistency, content validity and test-retest reliability was found for most APACS-Heb tasks and all composite scores. Furthermore, an effect of age and gender was found for most tasks with females outperformed males. In addition, a contribution of Theory of Mind to pragmatic production, pragmatic comprehension and APACS total scores was found. Lastly, a factor analysis revealed two factors, in which the first factor correlates with most tasks, and the second factor correlates only to humor. The results thus suggest that humor is a separate skill among the other pragmatic skills. In conclusion, normative data was collected for the APACS-Heb battery, and it was found that it is a valid and reliable measure of pragmatic skills. Since APACS is a comprehensive battery assessing the various aspects of figurative language, it can identify the specific deficits in figurative language and therefore may pinpoint the appropriate intervention program for each individual.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Section: Theory Of Mindmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Task 5: Humormentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Initial Validation for the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS) Hebrew Battery in Adolescents and Young Adults With Typical Development

Fussman

Mashal

2022

Front. Commun.

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“…Autistic individuals may also be less responsive to cues for turn-exchange and have difficulty conforming to appropriate norms for the timing and latency of turn-taking (Paul et al, 2009 ). Furthermore, research has demonstrated that autistic individuals perform more poorly than their neurotypical counterparts on tasks that require the understanding of figurative language (Cheung et al, 2019 ; Saban-Bezalel et al, 2019 ; Saban-Bezalel & Mashal, 2019 ).…”

Section: Autistic Adults May Be Erroneously Perceived As Deceptive An...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Autistic Adults May Be Erroneously Perceived as Deceptive and Lacking Credibility

Lim

Young

Brewer

2021

J Autism Dev Disord

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We hypothesized that autistic adults may be erroneously judged as deceptive or lacking credibility due to demonstrating unexpected and atypical behaviors. Thirty autistic and 29 neurotypical individuals participated in video-recorded interviews, and we measured their demonstration of gaze aversion, repetitive body movements, literal interpretation of figurative language, poor reciprocity, and flat affect. Participants (N = 1410) viewed one of these videos and rated their perception of the individual’s truthfulness or credibility. The hypothesis was partially supported, with autistic individuals perceived as more deceptive and less credible than neurotypical individuals when telling the truth. However, this relationship was not influenced by the presence of any of the target behaviors, but instead, by the individual’s overall presentation.

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Figurative language processing in autism spectrum disorders: A review

Lampri,

Peristeri,

Marinis

et al. 2023

Autism Research

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Impairments in the broader domain of pragmatics are considered to be a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A challenging aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to process nonliteral language. Interestingly, previous studies in figurative language comprehension in ASD have demonstrated conflicting results regarding participants' performance. The main scientific debate focuses on the underlying skills which facilitate processing of nonliteral speech in ASD. Namely, Theory of Mind (ToM), language abilities and Executive functions (EFs) are regarded as factors affecting autistic individuals' performance. This review addresses figurative language comprehension in ASD in light of the above three interpretive accounts. We reviewed data from recent studies in this field concluding that autistic children indeed encounter systematic difficulties in the processing of non‐literal language. Moreover, only ToM and verbal skills were found to correlate the most with figurative language comprehension in ASD. Notably, we found that differences related to research methodology and tasks' properties may have led to discrepancies between studies' results. Finally, we argue that future studies should encompass in their experimental design figurative comprehension tasks with minimal linguistic demands and also measures of ToM, verbal ability and EFs in order to shed more light in the independent contribution of those skills to the processing of nonliteral language in ASD.

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Different Factors Predict Idiom Comprehension in Children and Adolescents with ASD and Typical Development

Cited by 17 publications

References 48 publications

Initial Validation for the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS) Hebrew Battery in Adolescents and Young Adults With Typical Development

Initial Validation for the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS) Hebrew Battery in Adolescents and Young Adults With Typical Development

Autistic Adults May Be Erroneously Perceived as Deceptive and Lacking Credibility

Figurative language processing in autism spectrum disorders: A review

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