Figurative language processing in autism spectrum disorders: A review.
Theory-of-Mind and verbal level predict figurative-language trouble in autism; executive function tests waste assessment time.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lampri et al. (2024) read every paper they could find on how autistic people handle jokes, sarcasm, and metaphors. They pulled the results together into one big picture. The review did not run new kids; it counted what earlier work already showed.
What they found
The team saw a clear pattern: autistic children usually struggle with non-literal language. The two best clues to the struggle are Theory-of-Mind level and overall verbal skill. Executive-function scores added almost no extra hint about who would fail.
How this fits with other research
Song et al. (2024) ran a direct test the same year and got the same answer: second-order ToM, not executive function, predicts irony failure. Kritsotakis et al. (2026) widened the lens by adding dyslexic kids; they found grammar skill, not ToM, drove the figurative gap in both groups.
Petit et al. (2025) looks like a clash but is not. Their autistic group matched peers on metaphors yet bombed on scalar implicatures. The review’s broad claim of figurative trouble still holds; the trouble just shows up more on quick, in-the-moment inferences than on familiar metaphor tasks.
Richman et al. (2001) and Martin et al. (2004) set the stage two decades ago by linking ToM holes to metaphor and sarcasm problems. Stella’s review gathers those early clues and stamps them as the field’s stable signal.
Why it matters
When you test figurative language, grab a ToM task first and skip the long EF battery. If the child passes second-order false-belief, they may still need metaphor drills, but you can rule out basic mind-reading gaps. Target ToM and rich vocabulary before you chase elusive executive-function goals.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
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.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1002/aur.3069