Comprehension of literal statements and similes in Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorders.

Comprehension of literal statements and similes in Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorders. Clin Linguist Phon. 2019 Jul 09;:1-15 Authors: Cheung CC, Rong Y, Chen F, Chen S, Leung MT, Tang TPY, Peng G Abstract While it has been proposed, following relevance theory, that similes can be understood at a purely literal level on a par with literal statements, it remains unclear whether children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) perform similarly to typically developing (TD) children in comprehending literal statements and similes. The present study investigated comprehension of literal statements and similes in Cantonese-speaking children with HFASD and TD children matched on both chronological age and verbal mental age. An utterance-picture matching task was devised to assess their comprehension of literal statements and similes in Cantonese. Overall results showed that Cantonese-speaking children with HFASD performed worse than TD children in comprehending literal statements and similes, and both groups showed more difficulty in comprehending similes than literal statements. After the effects of chronological age and verbal mental age were controlled for, no group difference was found between children with HFASD and TD children in comprehending literal statements, whereas the group difference in simile comprehension still existed, suggesting that children with HFASD showed deficits in...
Source: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Clin Linguist Phon Source Type: research