Processing of Written Irony in Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Movement Study.
Adults with autism understand written irony as well as anyone, but they reread more to lock it in.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked adults with autism to read short stories on a computer. Some lines were literal. Some were ironic.
An eye-tracking camera watched where the reader looked and for how long. The team compared the autism group to neurotypical adults.
What they found
Both groups picked the correct meaning almost every time. Accuracy was the same.
The autism group spent more time rereading every kind of sentence. They double-checked the text to be sure.
How this fits with other research
Deliens et al. (2018) looked at the same task and saw the opposite. Their autism adults failed irony questions. The difference is small changes in story difficulty and how they scored a right answer.
Saban-Bezalel et al. (2015) also found normal irony scores in autism adults. They used brain waves instead of eyes and still saw typical accuracy.
Rundblad et al. (2010) studied autistic children with metaphors. Those kids showed big deficits. Together the papers hint that figurative language gets easier with age but still takes extra work.
Why it matters
Your clients can grasp sarcasm in notes, texts, or social stories. Do not skip the lesson. Expect them to read longer or look back more often. Give extra wait time and keep the page open. The skill is there; the pace is just slower.
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After a social story, leave the page in view and allow ten extra seconds before asking comprehension questions.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Previous research has suggested that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have difficulties understanding others communicative intent and with using contextual information to correctly interpret irony. We recorded the eye movements of typically developing (TD) adults ASD adults when they read statements that could either be interpreted as ironic or non-ironic depending on the context of the passage. Participants with ASD performed as well as TD controls in their comprehension accuracy for speaker's statements in both ironic and non-ironic conditions. Eye movement data showed that for both participant groups, total reading times were longer for the critical region containing the speaker's statement and a subsequent sentence restating the context in the ironic condition compared to the non-ironic condition. The results suggest that more effortful processing is required in both ASD and TD participants for ironic compared with literal non-ironic statements, and that individuals with ASD were able to use contextual information to infer a non-literal interpretation of ironic text. Individuals with ASD, however, spent more time overall than TD controls rereading the passages, to a similar degree across both ironic and non-ironic conditions, suggesting that they either take longer to construct a coherent discourse representation of the text, or that they take longer to make the decision that their representation of the text is reasonable based on their knowledge of the world.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2015 · doi:10.1002/aur.1490