Reasoning on Figurative Language: A Preliminary Study on Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Klinefelter Syndrome

Abstract

In this study we explored metaphor and idiom competencies in two clinical populations, children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with Klinefelter syndrome (KS), (age range: 9–12), compared to typically developing (TD) children of the same age. These three groups were tested with two multiple-choice tests assessing idiom comprehension through iconic and verbal alternatives and a metaphor comprehension test composed of novel, physical-psychological metaphors, requesting verbal explanations. To these instruments, another test was added, assessing basic sentence comprehension. Performances on the different linguistic tasks were examined by means of discriminant analysis which showed that idiom comprehension had a very small weight in distinguishing children with ASD from TD controls, whereas metaphor explanation did distinguish them. This study suggests that figurative language comprehension is not a “core deficit” per se in individuals with ASD. Only when the task requires to explicitly construct and explain a semantic mapping between the two terms of a metaphor does the performance of children with ASD significantly deviate from the typical population. These results are interpreted in terms of a difficulty in children with ASD and KS with complex cognitive and linguistic processes and also in relation with clinical assessment.