Visual, as compared to verbal, tasks are often assumed to be easier for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but is this true for story comprehension? This study evaluated story comprehension monitoring across visual, listening, and written modalities and assessed predictors in two closely matched groups (age, socioeconomic status,…

Individuals diagnosed with autism are often thought to face challenges in comprehensive metaphors, even for the individuals without intellectual impairment. This study is to investigate the features and mechanisms of metaphor integration in the process of metaphor comprehension in real-time and context-free situations in autism, as well as the…

This study investigated the comprehension of prosodically and syntactically marked focus by 5- to 8-year-old Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children listened to question-answer dialogues while looking at pictures depicting the scenarios, and judged whether the answers were correct responses to the…

The present study aimed to examine whether Mandarin-speaking children on the autism spectrum showed differences in comprehending spatial demonstratives ("this" and "that", and "here" and "there"), as compared to typically developing (TD) children. Another aim of this study was to investigate the roles of…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and epilepsy represent a comorbidity that negatively influences the proper development of linguistic competencies, particularly in receptive language, in the pediatric population. This group displays impairments in the auditory comprehension of both simple and complex grammatical structures, significantly limiting…

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…

We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment that tests whether autistic adults are able to maintain and switch between counterfactual and factual worlds. Participants (N = 48) read scenarios that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, then either maintained the counterfactual world or switched back to the factual world. When…

A survey asked autistic and non-autistic people about the driving difficulties they experience and their autistic traits. Principle components analysis was used to identify how reported difficulties clustered together in each group, and regression was used to determine which subscales of the Autism Spectrum Quotient predict these factors. For…

There is currently limited research and a lack of consensus on emotional processing impairments among adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present pilot study sought to characterize the extent to which adults with ASD are impaired in processing emotions in both words and pictures. Ten adults with ASD rated word and picture stimuli on…

Although there is evidence to suggest that adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty interpreting complex social situations, little is known about their understanding of bullying. Given the high rates of victimization in this population, it is important to investigate how adolescents with ASD comprehend bullying. Male…

This paper analyses disfluencies and ungrammatical expressions in the speech of 11-13-year-old Finnish-speaking boys with ASD (N = 5) and with neurotypical development (N = 6). The ASD data were from authentic group therapy sessions and neurotypical data from teacher-led group discussions. The proportion of disfluencies and ungrammatical…

A randomized feasibility trial of a parent coaching (PC) intervention was conducted across 16 community agencies in a Canadian province. Parents of toddlers with suspected autism were assigned to either a PC group (n = 24) or an enhanced community treatment (ECT) group (n = 25). PC participants received 24 weeks of coaching support from community…

The processing speed index (PSI) of the Wechsler intelligence scale for children (WISC-IV) has been found to predict a child's level of academic functioning. The consistently reported PSI weakness in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) therefore warrants special assistance and attempts at compensation for the disadvantages associated with…

This study investigated the effects of a parent-implemented dialogic reading approach--Reading to Engage Children with Autism in Language and Learning (RECALL)--on the engagement in reading and inference-making ability for preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Thirty-one preschoolers (mean age = 5.90 years, SD = 0.69; 26 boys, 5 girls)…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often described as being characterised by a uniform pragmatic impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that some areas of pragmatic functioning are preserved. This study seeks to determine to which extent context-based derivation of non-linguistically encoded meaning is functional in ASD. We compare the…