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Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research
04, 2024;17 (4): 674-689.

Figurative language processing in autism spectrum disorders: A review.

Stella Lampri, Eleni Peristeri, Theodoros Marinis, Maria Andreou
Author Information
  1. Stella Lampri: Department of Speech and Language Therapy, University of Peloponnese, Kalamata, Greece.
  2. Eleni Peristeri: Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece. ORCID
  3. Theodoros Marinis: Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
  4. Maria Andreou: Department of Speech and Language Therapy, University of Peloponnese, Kalamata, Greece. ORCID
PMID: 38071498 DOI: 10.1002/aur.3069

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.

Keywords

Theory of Mind autism spectrum disorder executive functions figurative language language skills pragmatics

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Grants

  1. /The research project entitled "Autism, Theory of Mind and Bilingualism (AuTism)" is implemented in the framework of H.F.R.I call "Basic research Financing (Horizontal support of all Sciences)" under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan "Greece 2.0" funded by the European Union -NextGeneration EU (H.F.R.I. Project Number: 14942, Principal Investigator: Maria Andreou).

MeSH Term

Child
Humans
Autism Spectrum Disorder
Language Tests
Language
Cognition
Autistic Disorder
Comprehension
Journal Article Review Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
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