The metaphor and sarcasm scenario test: a new instrument to help differentiate high functioning pervasive developmental disorder from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Abstract

It is sometimes difficult to discriminate high functioning pervasive developmental disorders (HFPDD) from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders (AD/HD) in young children because of the behavioral similarities between the two. For adequate diagnosis, understanding fundamental differences in their social cognitive abilities might become significant. In order to detect the differences in social cognitive abilities between AD/HD and HFPDD, a new test, the Metaphor and Sarcasm Scenario Test (MSST) was developed. One hundred and ninety-nine normal school children (the control group), 29 AD/HD children and 54 HFPDD children were involved. The results showed that the inability to understand a sarcastic situation was specific to children with HFPDD, both children with AD/HD and HFPDD could not equally understand metaphor. The correlation between the comprehension of sarcasm and success in the theory of mind task was remarkably high but not for comprehension of metaphor. In conclusion, the MSST has the potential to discriminate HFPDD from AD/HD in young children.

Communicative Competence in Alzheimer’s Disease

“…The Ethics Board of the Gunma University School of Health Sciences approved all procedures (No. [21][22][23][24][25][26], and written informed consent was obtained from all the participants.…”

“…22 This test consists of 5 metaphoric and 5 sarcastic sentences; metaphoric sentences are odd numbered and sarcastic sentences even. The words and sentences in MSST were selected from standard textbooks of Japanese language (Mitsumura Press) for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades in elementary school.…”

“…Thus, we conducted the present study to evaluate the deficits of metaphor and sarcasm in AD using a questionnaire that consists of the same type of sentences with similar difficulty levels and whose efficacy was validated for differential diagnosis of developmental disorders in children. 22 For a better understanding of characteristics of AD, error patterns were analyzed. We hypothesized that comprehension might be deteriorated at the early stages of disease and sarcasm comprehension might be deteriorated earlier than metaphor comprehension.…”

Processing of Ironic Language in Children with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Indeed, the interpretive skills required for irony appreciation are some of the skills thought to be particularly problematic for individuals with ASD (Happé 1993;Losh and Capps 2006). Several studies have now shown that some individuals with ASD have deficits in irony comprehension compared to their typically-developing peers (Adachi et al 2004;Kaland et al 2002;MacKay and Shaw, 2004;Martin and McDonald 2004;Wang et al 2006). For instance, in Kaland et al (2002), participants were presented with ironic remarks in the context of short stories and were asked ''Why did [ironic speaker] say that?''…”

“…Participants with ASD were less accurate in their responses; that is, less frequent in detecting that the ironic speaker was joking. Given these specific deficits in irony interpretation, some researchers have argued that an irony comprehension task could be used to discriminate HFASD from other developmental disorders, such as ADHD (Adachi et al 2004).…”