Automatic metaphor processing in adults with Asperger syndrome: a metaphor interference effect task

Automatic metaphor processing in developmental dyslexia

INTRODUCTION

Previous research found metaphor impairments with dyslexia; however, it is unclear if difficulties are due to initial activation of the metaphorical meaning or to subsequent discourse integration processes. The study examines the presence of early automatic processing of metaphors in adults with developmental dyslexia, considering the role of executive functions and metaphor familiarity.

METHODS

Using a sentence recall task and a semantic judgment task from the Metaphor Interference Effect (MIE) paradigm, we evaluated two early stages of metaphor comprehension, namely the generation of the figurative meaning and the suppression of the literal meaning. High and low familiar metaphors, and their scrambled counterparts, were aurally presented to participants, who were asked to judge whether sentences were literally true or literally false. Afterwards, they were provided ten minutes to recall the sentences they heard to verify the depth of processing for each type of stimulus. A total of 26 participants with dyslexia were included in the experimental group, and 31 in the control group.

RESULTS

Individuals with dyslexia showed a MIE and an accuracy rate that are similar to participants without dyslexia. Inhibition correlated with the MIE size only for high familiar metaphors, and working memory seemed to play no role in the process. In the recall task, both groups demonstrated a better encoding of the metaphorical sentences compared to scrambled metaphors, but participants with dyslexia recalled less metaphors than did the control group, showing that metaphors are no exception to the limitations in sentence retrieval typically found in dyslexia.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings suggest that individuals with dyslexia are comparable to participants without dyslexia in their ability to automatically compute metaphorical meanings. Thus, difficulties in metaphor comprehension in people with dyslexia that have been detected in previous studies might depend on meaning construction in context rather than online semantic processing.

Metaphor comprehension and production in verbally able children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Research in the field of figurative language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has demonstrated that autistic individuals experience systematic difficulties in the comprehension of different types of metaphors. However, there is scarce evidence regarding metaphor production skills in ASD. Importantly, the exact source of metaphor processing difficulties in ASD remains largely controversial. The debate has mainly focused on the mediating role of structural language skills (i.e., lexical knowledge) and cognitive abilities (i.e., Theory of Mind and executive functions) in ASD individuals' ability to comprehend and generate metaphors. The present study examines metaphor comprehension and production in 18 Greek-speaking verbally able children with ASD and 31 typically-developing (TD) controls. Participants completed two tasks, namely, a low-verbal multiple-choice sentence-picture matching task that tested their ability to comprehend conventional predicate metaphors, and a sentence continuation task that assessed their ability to generate metaphors. The study also included measures of fluid intelligence, expressive vocabulary, and working memory within the sample. The results show that the ASD group had significantly lower performance than the TD group in both metaphor comprehension and production. The findings also reveal that expressive vocabulary skills were a key factor in the metaphor comprehension and production performance of the children with ASD. Working memory capacity was also found to correlate significantly with metaphor comprehension performance in the ASD group. Conversely, no correlations were found in the TD group with neither of the above factors. Of note, children with ASD generated significantly more inappropriate responses and no-responses to the metaphor production task compared with the control group. The overall results reveal that children with ASD had difficulty with both comprehending and using metaphorical language. The findings also indicate that TD children may employ diverse cognitive strategies or rely on different underlying skills when processing metaphors compared with children with ASD.

Relatively Inefficient Integration of Metaphorical Semantics in Autistic Adults Without Intellectual Impairment

Individuals diagnosed with autism are often thought to face challenges in comprehensive metaphors, even for the individuals without intellectual impairment. This study is to investigate the features and mechanisms of metaphor integration in the process of metaphor comprehension in real-time and context-free situations in autism, as well as the influence of the mental complexity of metaphor. Twenty autistic adults and twenty typically developing peers carried out a Lexical Decision Task and a Recognition Task. The results of the study showed that, there are deficiencies in real-time metaphor comprehension in autistic adults without intellectual impairment. It may caused by their relatively inefficient integration of metaphor semantics. This mechanism was equally pronounced in the metaphors with different mental complexity.

Dialogic Priming and Dynamic Resonance in Autism: Creativity Competing with Engagement in Chinese Children with ASD

A growing body of research has focused on the relationship between priming and engagement through dialogue (e.g. Tantucci and Wang in Appl Linguist 43(1):115-146, 2022; Mikulincer et al. in Cognit Emotion 25:519-531, 2011). The present study addresses this issue also in relation to creativity and provides a new applied model to measure intersubjective engagement in ASD vs neurotypical populations' speech. We compared two balanced corpora of naturalistic Mandarin interaction of typically developing children and children diagnosed with ASD (cf. Zhou and Zhang in Xueqian jiaoyu yanjiu [Stud Preschool Educ] 6:72-84, 2020). We fitted a mixed effects linear regression showing that in both neurotypical and ASD populations, dialogic priming significantly correlates with engagement and with whether the child could creatively re-use the original input to produce a new construction. What we found is that creativity and intersubjective engagement are in competition in children with ASD in contrast with the neurotypical population. This finding points to a relatively impeded ability in ASD to re-combine creatively a priming input during the here-and-now of a dialogic event.

Metaphor Comprehension in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Core Language Skills Matter

Poor metaphor comprehension was considered a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but recent research has questioned the extent and the sources of these difficulties. In this cross-sectional study, we compared metaphor comprehension in individuals with ASD (N = 29) and individuals with typical development (TD; N = 31), and investigated the relationship between core language and metaphor comprehension. Individuals with ASD showed more difficulty but also a more variable performance in both metaphor and literal items of the task used than individuals with TD did. This indicates that core language ability accounts for metaphor comprehension and should be considered in future research and interventions aiming to improve metaphor comprehension in individuals with ASD.

Embodied Imagination and Metaphor Use in Autism Spectrum Disorder

This paper discusses different frameworks for understanding imagination and metaphor in the context of research on the imaginative skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In contrast to a standard linguistic framework, it advances an embodied and enactive account of imagination and metaphor. The paper describes a case study from a systemic therapeutic session with a child with ASD that makes use of metaphors. It concludes by outlining some theoretical insights into the imaginative skills of children with ASD that follow from taking the embodied-enactive perspective and proposes suggestions for interactive interventions to further enhance imaginative skills and metaphor understanding in children with ASD.

Verbal and Figural Creativity in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development

Previous studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate lower performance on creativity tasks. Yet, recent findings suggest that individuals with ASD are not necessarily impaired in verbal creativity, as measured by the novel metaphor generation task. The current study investigates verbal and figural creativity in 40 children with ASD (aged 11–14 years) and 39 peers with typical development (TD) (aged 11–15 years). We also tested the contribution of executive functions to the creative performance. A sentence completion questionnaire was used to test creative verbal generation, while a task of drawing non-existent objects was used to assess figural abilities. The results indicate that children with ASD generated a greater quantity of creative metaphors and showed greater use of a specific kind of representational change on the figural creativity task: cross-category insertions (e.g., a house with a tail). However, no correlation was found between the metaphor generation task and the use of cross-category insertions for either group. Results also showed that, whereas phonemic fluency contributed to the explained variance in novel metaphor generation in the ASD group, fluid intelligence, although only marginally, contributed to variance in novel metaphor generation in the TD group. These findings suggest that verbal creativity and figural creativity are two separate abilities relying on different cognitive resources. Our results show that those with ASD and TD differ in the cognitive abilities they use to perform the metaphor generation task. The research points to a unique creative cognition profile among children with ASD.

Creativity in Autism: An Examination of General and Mathematical Creative Thinking Among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Children with Typical Development

This study investigated creative thinking abilities among two groups of 20 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to 20 children with typical development ages 9-11. The study compared performance on two different creativity tests: general creativity (Pictorial Multiple Solutions-PMS) test versus mathematical creativity (Creating Equal Number-CEN) test, and investigated relationships between general and mathematical creative thinking across various cognitive measures including non-verbal IQ, verbal and non-verbal working memory and Attention. Results of the study demonstrate significant correlations among the measures of creativity indicating that the PMS and the CEN tasks represent different skills, or perhaps, different domains of creativity. Findings suggest that creativity can be found among individuals with ASD.

Non-literal understanding and psychosis: Metaphor comprehension in individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia

Previous studies suggest that understanding of non-literal expressions, and in particular metaphors, can be impaired in people with schizophrenia; although it is not clear why. We explored metaphor comprehension capacity using a novel picture selection paradigm; we compared task performance between people with schizophrenia and healthy comparator subjects and we further examined the relationships between the ability to interpret figurative expressions non-literally and performance on a number of other cognitive tasks. Eye-tracking was used to examine task strategy. We showed that even when IQ, years of education, and capacities for theory of mind and associative learning are factored in as covariates, patients are significantly more likely to interpret metaphorical expressions literally, despite eye-tracking findings suggesting that patients are following the same interpretation strategy as healthy controls. Inhibitory control deficits are likely to be one of multiple factors contributing to the poorer performance of our schizophrenia group on the metaphor trials of the picture selection task.

Selective Pragmatic Impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Indirect Requests Versus Irony

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often described as being characterised by a uniform pragmatic impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that some areas of pragmatic functioning are preserved. This study seeks to determine to which extent context-based derivation of non-linguistically encoded meaning is functional in ASD. We compare the performance of 24 adults with ASD, and matched neuro-typical adults in two act-out pragmatic tasks. The first task examines generation of indirect request interpretations, and the second the comprehension of irony. Intact contextual comprehension of indirect requests contrasts with marked difficulties in understanding irony. These results suggest that preserved pragmatics in ASD is limited to egocentric processing of context, which does not rely on assumptions about the speaker's mental states.

Pragmatics and social motivation in autism

Pragmatic deficits constitute a central feature of autism, which is highly relevant to Jaswal & Akhtar's criticisms of the social motivation theory of autism. Recent research reveals that while certain context-based interpretations are accessible, more complex pragmatic phenomena remain challenging for people on the spectrum. Such a selective pragmatic impairment is difficult to account for in motivational terms.

A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Study of Novel Metaphor and Metonymy Comprehension in Children, Adolescents, and Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Previous studies have shown that comprehension of figurative language is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, most studies have focused on lexicalized expressions and have only examined performance at one particular point in time, without examining how performance changes over development. The current study examined the comprehension of novel metaphor and metonymy in individuals with ASDs from a large age range, using both a cross-sectional (Experiment 1) and longitudinal design (Experiment 2). Performance in the ASD group was lower compared to typically developing (TD) controls, across all ages. Importantly, the results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that, although chronological age was not a good predictor for performance of either novel metaphor or metonymy in the cross-sectional design, performance improved when longitudinal data was considered. Correlations between vocabulary knowledge, visuo-spatial abilities and figurative language comprehension abilities were also explored.

Figurative language comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: A meta-analytic review

We present a meta-analysis of studies that compare figurative language comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder and in typically developing controls who were matched based on chronological age or/and language ability. A total of 41 studies and 45 independent effect sizes were included based on predetermined inclusion criteria. Group matching strategy, age, types of figurative language, and cross-linguistic differences were examined as predictors that might explain heterogeneity in effect sizes. Overall, individuals with autism spectrum disorder showed poorer comprehension of figurative language than their typically developing peers (Hedges' g = -0.57). A meta-regression analysis showed that group matching strategy and types of figurative language were significantly related to differences in effect sizes, whereas chronological age and cross-linguistic differences were not. Differences between the autism spectrum disorder and typically developing groups were small and nonsignificant when the groups were matched based on the language ability. Metaphors were more difficult to comprehend for individuals with autism spectrum disorder compared with typically developing controls than were irony and sarcasm. Our findings highlight the critical role of core language skills in figurative language comprehension. Interventions and educational programmes designed to improve social communication skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorder may beneficially target core language skills in addition to social skills.

Behavioral, Cognitive and Neural Markers of Asperger Syndrome

Asperger syndrome (AS) is a subtype of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) characterized by major problems in social and nonverbal communication, together with limited and repetitive forms of behavior and interests. The linguistic and cognitive development in AS is preserved which help us to differentiate it from other subtypes of ASD. However, significant effects of AS on cognitive abilities and brain functions still need to be researched. Although a clear cut pathology for Asperger has not been identified yet, recent studies have largely focused on brain imaging techniques to investigate AS. In this regard, we carried out a systematic review on behavioral, cognitive, and neural markers (specifically using MRI and fMRI) studies on AS. In this paper, behavior, motor skills and language capabilities of individuals with Asperger are compared to those in healthy controls. In addition, common findings across MRI and fMRI based studies associated with behavior and cognitive disabilities are highlighted.

[Pragmatics in autism spectrum disorder: recent developments]

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by primary pragmatic difficulties, out of step with verbal and non-verbal developmental level. This selective survey paper addresses three recent domains of research on pragmatic functions in autism. First, we provide an up-to-date discussion of how lack of sensitivity to social cues impacts early acquisition of words. Second, we review recent findings on the comprehension of non-literal language, pointing to a more refined clinical reality. Third, we describe recent developments in the study of conversation skills in autism.

Freiburg Questionnaire of linguistic pragmatics (FQLP): psychometric properties based on a psychiatric sample

BACKGROUND

Asperger's Syndrome (AS) is an autism spectrum disorder that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, and restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. Difficulties with respect to pragmatic speech, reading emotional and social cues, differentiating between fact and fiction, and taking into account the influence of context on a statement are commonly described features. However, hitherto established questionnaires did not focus on these symptoms.

METHODS

In this study we present a short (11 questions) questionnaire which focuses on self-rated pragmatic speech abilities, the Freiburg Questionnaire of linguistic pragmatics (FQLP). Psychometric properties of the questionnaire were explored in a sample of 57 patients with Asperger's Syndrome, 66 patients with other psychiatric disorders, and a convenience sample of 56 people.

RESULTS

Reliability analysis showed a high Cronbach's α. Strong correlations could be demonstrated for the FQLP with the Autism Quotient and the Empathy Quotient. Concerning divergent validity a moderate correlation was found between the FQLP and self-rated symptoms of personality disorders. No significant correlation was found between the FQLP and the vocabulary skills. The receiver operating characteristics curve showed an excellent diagnostic accuracy of the FQLP (.97).

CONCLUSIONS

As the control group consisted of people without mental disorder and patients with different psychiatric disorders, the results indicate that the construct examined by the FQLP is quite specific to the peculiarities of AS. The FQLP is a reliable, brief and valid instrument. First results regarding sensitivity and specificity are highly promising.

Verbal creativity in autism: comprehension and generation of metaphoric language in high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and typical development

Studies on creativity in participants with autism generally show impoverished performance as well as deficient comprehension of metaphoric language. However, very little is known about the ability to generate metaphors in this population. The present study examines verbal creativity in adults with autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) through tasks that rely on novel metaphoric language. Seventeen adults with ASD (mean age = 21.06) and 17 typically developing peers (mean age = 22.71) participated in the study. A multiple-choice questionnaire consisting of conventional and novel metaphors was used to test comprehension, and a sentence completion questionnaire was used to test generation of creative language. Results show similar performance in comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors in both groups, whereas adults with ASD generated more creative metaphors relative to the control group. Scores on tests of vocabulary and naming contributed to the prediction of conventional metaphor comprehension, while scores on tests of mental flexibility contributed to the prediction of novel metaphor comprehension. In addition, scores on a test of non-verbal intelligence contributed to the prediction of metaphor generation. The study points to unique verbal creativity in ASD.