Salience and Context: Interpretation of Metaphorical and Literal Language by Young Adults Diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome

Abstract

Asperger's Syndrome (AS) involves difficulties in social communication but no delays in language or cognitive development. According to the received view, individuals with AS are biased toward the literal and are insensitive to contextual cues. According to the graded salience hypothesis (Giora, 1997 Giora, R. 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 7(1): 183–206. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2003 Giora, R. 2003. On our mind: Salience, context and figurative language, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), participants with AS and controls would be sensitive to both context and degree of salience rather than to degree of nonliterality. Our results show that while individuals with AS generally performed worse than controls, their overall pattern of response was similar to that of controls: both groups performed worse on novel than on familiar expressions, whether literal or metaphorical; both groups benefited from context, which reduced response times and error rates on novel but not on familiar metaphors; both groups rated negative utterances as more metaphoric than their affirmative counterparts. Individuals with AS, then, are sensitive to context and degree of salience and are not biased toward the literal.

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