Comprehension of novel metaphor in young children with Developmental Language Disorder (original) (raw)
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Frontiers in Communication, 2021
Figurative and extended uses of language are nonliteral utterances such as irony, sarcasm, and idioms and comprise a core part of social interaction. Children with typical development (TD) show a progressive adultlike understanding of figurative language around the age of ten. In contrast, individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or developmental language disorder often display difficulties with figurative language. However, these difficulties are a puzzle in that the actual underlying causes remain unclear. Those individuals who struggle with understanding figurative language need support through effective interventions. These should be based on solid research findings, which is often problematic as research in this field is characterized by conflicting and incomplete findings. The intention of this study is to conduct a literature review of both available studies and those interventio...
Dyslexia, 2016
Difficulties with figurative language comprehension were documented in adult dyslexia (DYS). In the present research, we investigated the comprehension and generation of metaphors in 37 children, 35 adolescents, and 34 adults with and without DYS. We also tested the contribution of executive function to metaphor processing. A multiple-choice questionnaire with conventional and novel metaphors was used to assess comprehension; a concept-explanation task was used to test conventional and novel metaphor generation (verbal creativity). The findings indicated differences between the dyslexic children and the control group in conventional metaphor comprehension. However, both groups performed similarly in the novel metaphor comprehension test. Furthermore, although children and adolescents with DYS showed similar performance in metaphor generation as their typically developing peers, adults with DYS generated more metaphors than controls. While scores on tests of verbal knowledge and mental flexibility contributed to the prediction of conventional metaphor comprehension, scores on non-verbal tests and mental flexibility contributed to the prediction of novel metaphor generation. Our findings suggest that individuals with DYS are not impaired in novel metaphor comprehension and metaphor generation and that metaphor comprehension and generation utilize different cognitive resources.
Metaphor Comprehension and Interpretation in Cleft Palate Children Aged 6–9
Psychology of Language and Communication
The level of metaphor comprehension and interpretation was investigated in a sample of children with cleft palate (CP), aged 6;0-8;11, and healthy controls matched with age, sex, socioeconomic status, and IQ level. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Revised (WISC-R) was used to evaluate the children’s cognitive functioning, and the metaphor tests from a modified version of the Right Hemisphere Language Battery - Polish version (RHLB-PL) were used to assess comprehension of figurative language. The CP and control groups differed significantly in Verbal IQ values and in performance in the Vocabulary test, Comprehension test, Picture Metaphor Explanation test, and Written Metaphor Explanation test. In both metaphor explanation tests, children with CP gave fewer responses than controls. The results suggest no differences between children with CP and controls in understanding figurative language, although they point to weaker performance in communicating responses and produci...
Figurative language processing in atypical populations: the ASD perspective
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2015
The mechanisms underlying the processing of figurative language have been widely debated and tested 15 in numerous experiments aiming to answer the basic questionto what extent does figurative language 16 depend on literal/compositional processes at the initial stages of interpretation (Gibbs, 1994; Cacciari 17 and Tabossi, 1988; Levorato et al., 2004; Vega-Moreno, 2001)? Detailed behavioural and imaging 18 research has shown that interpretation depends on the type of expression, its degree of 19 compositionality/transparency, its linguistic structure, its source domain of knowledge, and not in the 20 least, its novelty/conventionality. If we assume, however, that figurative and extended uses of language 21 essentially depend on the perception and processing of more concrete core concepts and phenomena, 22 40 41 Vulchanova et al.
Brain sciences, 2017
Recent research into difficulties in figurative language in children with ASD highlighted that it is possible to devise training interventions to overcome these difficulties by teaching specific strategies. This study describes how children with ASD can improve their capability to explain metaphors with a treatment. Two types of metaphors, in the "X is Y" form, were addressed: sensory and physico-psychological. To face the difficulties posed by these metaphors, the adult taught two strategies: inserting the connective "is like" between "X" and "Y", which transforms the metaphor into a simile; comparing "X" and "Y" by means of thinking maps. Two tests of metaphor comprehension were used, one based on sensory and the other on physico-psychological metaphors. Sixteen 10 year-old children participated into the study, including an experimental group formed by 8 children with ASD (n = 4) which had received the treatment, and a co...
Explaining metaphors in high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder children: A brief report
Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2012
Figurative speech comprehension is a source of difficulty for high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) children, especially with regard to metaphors. Experimental research in this area has not provided conclusive results. The first experimental studies were conducted in the early 1990s within the theoretical and methodological framework of theory of mind , in which the metaphor was viewed as an advanced test for mentalisation capabilities. Studying autistic individuals of an age range between 9 and 28 years old, Happé found a correlation between metaphor comprehension and the solution to first-order false belief tasks (Baron-Cohen, , which was interpreted as evidence that understanding metaphorical utterances requires the capability to infer a speaker's communicative intentions and, more generally, to attribute mental states to the speaker. More recent studies have highlighted and discussed the role of factors associated with theory of mind . The explanatory power of this construct has been disputed by other researchers, such as Norbury , who redesigned the experimental task devised by and found that the ability to succeed on false belief tasks in 8-15-year-old autistic children did not guarantee, by itself, that they also understood metaphors. Metaphor comprehension draws upon specific lexical notions and extralinguistic knowledge, which are both stored in semantic memory. The metaphor is not the only problematic figure of speech for ASD individuals. studied comprehension of sarcasm and metaphor in children of an age range between 7-and 14 years old (Total IQ and Verbal IQ > 70) and found that their understanding of sarcasm was even more deficient than their understanding of metaphor.
Journal of experimental …, 2010
The domain of figurative language comprehension was used to probe the developmental relation between language and cognition in typically developing individuals and individuals with Williams syndrome. Extending the work of , the emergence of non-literal similarity and category knowledge was investigated in 117 typically developing children aged between 4 and 12, 19 typically developing adults, 15 children with Williams syndrome between 5 and 12 years of age, and 8 adults with Williams syndrome. Participants were required to complete similarity and categorization statements by selecting one of two words (e.g., either "The sun is like...?" or "The sun is the same kind of thing as...?") with word pairs formed from items that were literally, perceptually, or functionally similar to the target word, or else anomalous (e.g., 'moon', 'orange', 'oven', or 'chair', respectively). Results indicated that individuals with Williams syndrome may access different, less abstract knowledge in figurative language comparisons, despite the relatively strong verbal abilities found in this disorder.
Metaphor Comprehension in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Core Language Skills Matter
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2021
Poor metaphor comprehension was considered a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but recent research has questioned the extent and the sources of these difficulties. In this cross-sectional study, we compared metaphor comprehension in individuals with ASD (N = 29) and individuals with typical development (TD; N = 31), and investigated the relationship between core language and metaphor comprehension. Individuals with ASD showed more difficulty but also a more variable performance in both metaphor and literal items of the task used than individuals with TD did. This indicates that core language ability accounts for metaphor comprehension and should be considered in future research and interventions aiming to improve metaphor comprehension in individuals with ASD.
2017
The study of developmental trajectories in metaphor comprehension has prevailingly addressed typically developing children (TD children, henceforth), and more recently, also children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD, henceforth). Monitoring these trajectories longitudinally illuminates potentialities and residual weaknesses in children having had difficulties in handling figurative language. The present study describes the case of a child with ASD, M.M. (a pseudonym) who received a specific intervention when he was 8,10 to improve sensory metaphor comprehension. Afterwards, his capability to explain physico-psychological metaphors, which are more complex, was monitored across a 5-year span. During this interval, M.M was assessed three times at approximately 18 months distance, and compared to a group of TD children matched by age, school grade, number and dates of assessment. The results at a test measuring physico-psychological metaphors are analysed. Beyond quantitative differen...
Brain Sciences
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 req...