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, 2003), 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.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors dedicate the article to Inga Eidelman, who passed away shortly after she had finished preparing the program for their studies. The studies reported here were supported by a grant to Rachel Giora by The Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 652/07) and Vice President for Research and Development at TAU Encouragement Fund. The authors wish to thank Tamir Atsmon, the head of Beit Ekstein's Group home Beit Ofek–Afeka, for allowing them access to participants diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and to relevant information about the participants. Thanks are also extended to Zohar Lev from The Multidisciplinary Center for Individuals Diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome of the Beit Ekstein Group and to Professor Tally Sagie and Dr. Assaf Tripto for information about the diagnostic tests. They also thank Neta Rousso and Dr. Ronit Welgreen for helpful information and for all their help. In particular, they are very grateful to the participants with AS for their cooperation. Additionally, they wish to thank Atar Abramson and Haim Dubossarsky for running Experiment 3 and Yossi Arzouan, Henri Cohen, Miriam Faust, Barbara Hemforth, Barbara Kaup, Itamar Mendelson, Orna Peleg, Yeshayahu Shen, Eran Zaidel, and two reviewers for very helpful comments and criticisms.

Notes

¹In Gold and her colleagues' studies relative familiarity was established only for metaphors.

²Given the nosological debate surrounding Asperger's syndrome, our findings reported later need not necessarily generalize to other ASD individuals.

³Some metaphoric items were taken from Mashal, Faust, & Hendler (2005).

⁴Note that in Hebrew there are neither indefinite articles nor capital letters.

⁵Running the analyses on all the responses, the incorrect ones included, produced the same results.

⁶This is also the case when all the responses are included in the analysis or when participants, who made either 7 or 8 errors in one of the conditions, are discarded from the analysis.

⁷Although several of the participants with AS were receiving medication and this may have affected the results of this study, it seems, however, that the most likely effect would be towards diminishing their performance (for example through sedation); this may have influenced the strength but not the direction of the study's results.

⁸One should note that all the pretests controlling for our items were run on individuals without AS (for the scarcity of individuals with AS). While both groups were matched for age, sex, and education, verbal IQ scores were not collected.

⁹Specifically, when provided with two types of cues—event knowledge and prosodic cues—participants with ASD were marginally more accurate than when provided with one cue—event knowledge—only, F(1, 17 = 3.9, p = .06 (Mirella Dapretto, personal communication, June 24, 2009).