Online Metaphor Comprehension in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders: An Eye Tracking Study.

This study looked at how adults with autism understand metaphors (like 'time flies'). Researchers used eye-tracking technology while participants chose between literal and figurative meanings of sentences. Adults with autism understood metaphors just as well as others, but took much longer to process them (about 800 milliseconds slower). Their eye movements showed they spent more time looking at literal interpretations, suggesting they have to work harder to move beyond the obvious meaning to understand the metaphor.

This eye-tracking study examined metaphor comprehension in 40 adults (18 with ASD, 22 controls) using a visual world paradigm. Participants listened to sentences and selected between literal and metaphorical interpretations while their eye movements were recorded. Adults with ASD demonstrated equivalent accuracy in understanding novel metaphors compared to typically-developing controls. However, they showed significantly slower reaction times (approximately 800ms delay) and longer fixation times on both target and distractor images.

The extended fixation on distractor images suggests difficulty overcoming literal interpretations, indicating a 'literality bias.' Vocabulary abilities did not correlate with performance, suggesting the processing differences are independent of general verbal skills.

Results suggest adults with ASD may need additional processing time for figurative language in therapeutic and educational settings. The literality bias finding supports interventions that explicitly teach figurative language interpretation strategies rather than assuming comprehension deficits.

Small sample size (40 participants total). Study focused only on novel metaphors, which may not generalize to familiar figurative language. Limited to adult population, so findings may not apply to children or adolescents with ASD.

The aim of this study was to investigate novel metaphor comprehension in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous literature is conflicting about whether individuals with ASD have impairment in this particular type of figurative language. Participants in the study completed a visual world paradigm eye-tracking task, which involved selecting an interpretation of an auditorily presented sentence (i.e. a picture-sentence matching task), where images corresponded to literal and metaphorical interpretations. Thus, the study also investigated online processing, via reaction times and eye movements.

Forty adults participated in the study (18 with ASD and 22 typically-developing controls). Each participant completed the AQ questionnaire and had their vocabulary assessed. Results showed that participants with ASD comprehended metaphorical utterances with the same accuracy as controls. However, they had significantly slower reaction times, and specifically, were approximately 800 ms slower.

Analysis of eye movements revealed that participants with ASD showed significantly longer fixation times on both the target and distractor image, the latter of which suggests difficulty overcoming the literal interpretation. Consistent with some prior studies, we showed that adults with ASD are not impaired in novel metaphor comprehension, but they were clearly less efficient. Verbal abilities did not significantly relate to performance. Finally, our online processing measure (eye tracking) provided us with insights into the nature of the ASD inefficiency (i.e. a literality bias).