Metaphor comprehension and production in verbally able children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Even talkative autistic kids struggle to grasp and create metaphors, and their expressive vocabulary level is the best predictor.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Stella and her team asked verbally able Greek-speaking kids with autism to do two things. First, explain simple metaphors like "time is money." Second, invent their own metaphors.
They compared the autistic group to typically developing peers of the same age. Everyone could speak in full sentences, so the test was about figurative language, not basic talking.
What they found
The autistic children understood fewer metaphors and created fewer original ones. Their expressive vocabulary score predicted how well they did on both tasks.
Even kids with big vocabularies still lagged behind typical peers. The gap stayed even after the researchers controlled for IQ.
How this fits with other research
Rundblad et al. (2010) saw the same metaphor gap in English-speaking kids fourteen years earlier. That study adds weight: the problem is stable across languages and time.
Au-Yeung et al. (2015) looks like a contradiction at first. Their autistic adults understood written irony as well as controls. The twist is irony can be solved with context clues, while metaphors need flexible word links. Different figurative types, different demands.
Halstead et al. (2018) meta-analysis bundles metaphor under "written expression deficits." Stella’s data now pinpoints metaphor as one clear piece inside that bigger writing puzzle.
Why it matters
If a child can chat but falters on metaphors, don’t assume full language competence. Check expressive vocabulary first; boost it with explicit teaching of multiple word meanings and comparisons. Use visual supports and sentence stems like "A cloud is a ___" to practice generation. Targeting vocabulary size can widen figurative language later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
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.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1002/aur.3210