The Leslie and Susan Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2010 Jul;40(7):800-11. doi: 10.1007/s10803-009-0930-1.
This study examined whether the known difficulties in metaphor comprehension exhibited by persons with Asperger syndrome (AS) can be explained by a dysfunctional right hemisphere (RH). Using the divided visual field paradigm, 27 AS participants and 36 matched controls were presented with word pairs of four types (literal, conventional metaphors, novel metaphors, and unrelated word pairs), and were asked to perform a semantic judgment task. The main hypothesis was that whereas the control group participants will show RH superiority for novel metaphor processing, no RH superiority will be found in the AS group. Results indeed indicate much less RH contribution to novel metaphor comprehension in AS, and are discussed in light of linguistic models and the neurobiology of autism.
本研究考察了阿斯伯格综合征（AS）患者在隐喻理解方面所表现出的已知困难是否可以用右半球（RH）功能障碍来解释。研究采用了视觉分割范式，对 27 名 AS 参与者和 36 名匹配的对照组参与者进行了四种类型的词对（字面意思、传统隐喻、新颖隐喻和不相关的词对）的呈现，并要求他们进行语义判断任务。主要假设是对照组参与者在新颖隐喻处理方面会表现出 RH 优势，而在 AS 组中则不会发现 RH 优势。结果确实表明，AS 患者在新颖隐喻理解方面的 RH 贡献要小得多，这一结果结合语言模型和自闭症的神经生物学进行了讨论。
