Can You Play with Fire and Not Hurt Yourself? A Comparative Study in Figurative Language Comprehension between Individuals with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder
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Individuals with High functioning autism (HFA) are distinguished by relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive skills. However, problems with pragmatic language skills have been consistently reported across the autistic spectrum, even when structural language is intact. Our main goal was to investigate how highly verbal individuals with autism process figurative language and whether manipulation of the stimuli presentation modality had an impact on the processing. We were interested in the extent to which visual context, e.g., an image corresponding either to the literal meaning or the figurative meaning of the expression may facilitate responses to such expressions. Participants with HFA and their typically developing peers (matched on intelligence and language level) completed a cross-modal sentence-picture matching task for figurative expressions and their target figurative meaning represented in images. We expected that the individuals with autism would have difficulties in appreciating the non-literal nature of idioms and metaphors, despite intact structural language skills. Analyses of accuracy and reaction times showed clearly that the participants with autism performed at a lower level than their typically developing peers. Moreover, the modality in which the stimuli were presented was an important variable in task performance for the more transparent expressions. The individuals with autism displayed higher error rates and greater reaction latencies in the auditory modality compared to the visual stimulus presentation modality, implying more difficulty. Performance differed depending on type of expression. Participants had more difficulty understanding the culturally-based expressions, but not expressions grounded in human experience (biological idioms). This research highlights the importance of stimulus presentation modality and that this can lead to differences in figurative language comprehension between typically and atypically developing individuals. The current study also contributes to current debates on the role of structural language in figurative language comprehension in autism.
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When visual and auditory modalities are compared, individuals with ASD present the poorest performances in the auditory modality, showing difficulties to understand culturally based expressions.
“When visual and auditory modalities are compared, individuals with ASD present the poorest performances in the auditory modality, showing difficulties to understand culturally based expressions (Chahboun et al. 2016).”
From Autism Spectrum Disorder and auditory sensory alterations: a systematic review on the integrity of cognitive and neuronal functions related to auditory processing (2023) · cites this paper as Chahboun et al. 2016
Stimulus presentation modality can lead to differences in figurative language comprehension, even with high-verbal ASD individuals matched with TD peers on intelligence and language level.
“The stimulus presentation modality can lead to differences in figurative language comprehension, even with high-verbal ASD individuals (matched with TD peers on intelligence and language level) (Chahboun et al. 2016).”
From Autism Spectrum Disorder and auditory sensory alterations: a systematic review on the integrity of cognitive and neuronal functions related to auditory processing (2023) · cites this paper as Chahboun et al. 2016
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Electrocommunication in pulse Gymnotiformes: the role of EOD time course in species identification.
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Initiating and Institutionalizing Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics in Nepal: A Report
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Some (but not all) Pragmatic Inferences are Difficult for Autistic Children
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Theory of Mind in Autism: From a Primary Deficit to Just Mutual Misunderstanding?
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- Authors
- Chahboun, S., Vulchanov, V., Saldaña, D., Eshuis, H., & Vulchanova, M.
- Affiliations
- Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NO)
- Universidad de Sevilla (ES)
- Corresponding author
- Vulchanova, Mila
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2016-12-30
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- e0168571
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5201294
- OpenAlex
- W2569270208
- Cited by
- 59
- References
- 69
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 8
- FWCI
- 2.97
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- BIBSYS Brage (BIBSYS (Norway)) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Deposito de Investigacion Universidad de Sevilla (University of Seville) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- European Union’s Seventh Framework Program for research, technological development and demonstration (316748)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Autism Spectrum Disorder Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
- Keywords
- autism spectrum disorder, high-functioning autism, figurative language comprehension, idioms, metaphor, pragmatic language, visual context, sentence-picture matching, cultural idioms, structural language, reaction time
- MeSH terms
- Autism Spectrum Disorder, Adolescent, Autistic Disorder, Child, Female, Humans, Language, Linguistics, Male, Reaction Time, Metaphor, Comprehension
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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