Department of Education and Professional Studies, King's College London, London, UK.
Autism. 2010 Jan;14(1):29-46. doi: 10.1177/1362361309340667.
One of the most noticeable problems in autism involves the social use of language such as metaphor and metonymy, both of which are very common in daily language use. The present study is the first to investigate the development of metaphor and metonymy comprehension in autism. Eleven children with autism were compared to 17 typically developing children in a metaphor-metonymy comprehension task. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses were used to compare the development of metaphor and metonymy comprehension using a child-friendly story picture task. Trajectories were constructed linking task performance either to chronological age or to measures of mental age. Children with autism showed an impaired metaphor comprehension in relation to both chronological and mental age, whereas performance on metonymy was delayed and in line with their receptive vocabulary. Our results suggest that understanding of metaphors and metonyms are severely affected at all ages examined in the current study.
自闭症中最显著的问题之一涉及语言的社交使用，如隐喻和转喻，它们在日常语言使用中非常常见。本研究首次调查了自闭症中隐喻和转喻理解的发展。在隐喻-转喻理解任务中，将 11 名自闭症儿童与 17 名典型发展儿童进行了比较。使用儿童友好型故事图片任务，使用横截面轨迹分析来比较隐喻和转喻理解的发展。轨迹的构建将任务表现与年龄或心理年龄的测量值联系起来。自闭症儿童在与年龄和心理年龄相关的隐喻理解方面表现出受损，而转喻的表现则延迟，与他们的接受性词汇量相符。我们的结果表明，在当前研究中检查的所有年龄段，对隐喻和转喻的理解都受到严重影响。
