Master Tamar Kalandadze

This article-based thesis aimed to investigate figurative language comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The first article reports the meta-analysis of 41 studies that examined figurative language in individuals with ASD compared with individuals with typical development (TD). The main finding is that although individuals with ASD as a group performed poorer than individuals with TD on figurative language comprehension tasks, the differences between studies were associated with the group matching strategies (whether the groups were matched based on participants' core language ability, on chronological age, or both) and differences in figurative language types. In particular, group differences were small and nonsignificant when the groups were matched based on the language ability. In addition, the results revealed that individuals with ASD performed poorer than individuals with TD on metaphor tasks than on irony tasks. The second article investigated metaphor comprehension and its relationship to core language abilities in Norwegian-speaking children and adolescents with ASD (N=28; aged 10-16 years) compared with peers with TD (N=31). The main finding was that individuals with ASD on average scored lower on multiple-choice metaphor task, but this was to a great degree related to participants' inferior core language ability rather than the ASD diagnosis per se. The third article reports a systematic review and a meta-analysis of studies on metaphor comprehension in individuals with ASD compared with individuals with TD with a special focus on assessment tools. Overall, studies in ASD have used different, often study-specific tasks to assess metaphor comprehension. Verbal explanation task resulted in the largest effect size indicating that explaining metaphors verbally is most challenging for individuals with ASD. Overall, individuals with ASD were outperformed by individuals with TD on metaphor comprehension, but due to the sparse experimental manipulations, the role of metaphor task properties could not be established.

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