Van Herwegen Jo, Rundblad Gabriella
Department of Psychology, Kingston University London, London, United Kingdom.
School of Education, Communication and Society, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2018 Jun 11;9:945. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00945. eCollection 2018.
Previous studies have shown that comprehension of figurative language is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, most studies have focused on lexicalized expressions and have only examined performance at one particular point in time, without examining how performance changes over development. The current study examined the comprehension of novel metaphor and metonymy in individuals with ASDs from a large age range, using both a cross-sectional (Experiment 1) and longitudinal design (Experiment 2). Performance in the ASD group was lower compared to typically developing (TD) controls, across all ages. Importantly, the results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that, although chronological age was not a good predictor for performance of either novel metaphor or metonymy in the cross-sectional design, performance improved when longitudinal data was considered. Correlations between vocabulary knowledge, visuo-spatial abilities and figurative language comprehension abilities were also explored.
先前的研究表明，自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者对比喻性语言的理解存在缺陷。然而，大多数研究都集中在词汇化表达上，并且只在一个特定时间点考察表现，而没有考察表现如何随发育而变化。本研究使用横断面设计（实验1）和纵向设计（实验2），对来自较大年龄范围的ASD患者的新颖隐喻和转喻理解进行了考察。在所有年龄段中，ASD组的表现均低于发育正常（TD）的对照组。重要的是，实验1和实验2的结果表明，虽然在横断面设计中，实际年龄并不是新颖隐喻或转喻表现的良好预测指标，但考虑纵向数据时，表现有所改善。研究还探讨了词汇知识、视觉空间能力和比喻性语言理解能力之间的相关性。
