Abstract
Studies on creativity in participants with autism generally show impoverished performance as well as deficient comprehension of metaphoric language. However, very little is known about the ability to generate metaphors in this population. The present study examines verbal creativity in adults with autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) through tasks that rely on novel metaphoric language. Seventeen adults with ASD (mean age = 21.06) and 17 typically developing peers (mean age = 22.71) participated in the study. A multiple-choice questionnaire consisting of conventional and novel metaphors was used to test comprehension, and a sentence completion questionnaire was used to test generation of creative language. Results show similar performance in comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors in both groups, whereas adults with ASD generated more creative metaphors relative to the control group. Scores on tests of vocabulary and naming contributed to the prediction of conventional metaphor comprehension, while scores on tests of mental flexibility contributed to the prediction of novel metaphor comprehension. In addition, scores on a test of non-verbal intelligence contributed to the prediction of metaphor generation. The study points to unique verbal creativity in ASD.
Highlights
People with autistic-spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties in comprehension of figurative language, and tend to give literal interpretation to ambiguous syntactic expressions, to phrases that convey irony, humor, or sarcasm, to idioms, or to metaphors (Happé, 1993, 1995; Kerbel and Grunwell, 1998; Rapin and Dunn, 2003; Adachi et al, 2004; Rundblad and Annaz, 2010; Mashal and Kasirer, 2011)
In a recent study we found that children with ASD differ from typically developing (TD) children in comprehension of conventional metaphors but not in comprehension of novel metaphors (Mashal and Kasirer, 2011)
EFFECTS OF VOCABULARY ON COMPREHENSION TEST SCORES Since vocabulary scores were significantly lower in the ASD group than in the TD group, we examined the effects of vocabulary knowledge on performance
Summary
People with autistic-spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties in comprehension of figurative language, and tend to give literal interpretation to ambiguous syntactic expressions, to phrases that convey irony, humor, or sarcasm, to idioms, or to metaphors (Happé, 1993, 1995; Kerbel and Grunwell, 1998; Rapin and Dunn, 2003; Adachi et al, 2004; Rundblad and Annaz, 2010; Mashal and Kasirer, 2011). Despite extensive research on comprehension of metaphoric language in autism, very little is known about how people with ASD generate metaphors. The present study investigates comprehension and generation of novel metaphors in ASD. Responses to metaphors were significantly slower than were responses to the other types of expressions, but this pattern of results characterized both groups, with no impairment in performance seen in the ASD group. There is evidence that people with ASD demonstrate no difficulties with figurative language, contrary to previous arguments in the literature
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