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Research in the field of figurative language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has demonstrated that autistic individuals experience systematic difficulties in the comprehension of different types of metaphors. However, there is scarce evidence regarding metaphor production skills in ASD. Importantly, the exact source of metaphor processing difficulties in ASD remains largely controversial. The debate has mainly focused on the mediating role of structural language skills (i.e., lexical knowledge) and cognitive abilities (i.e., Theory of Mind and executive functions) in ASD individuals' ability to comprehend and generate metaphors. The present study examines metaphor comprehension and production in 18 Greek‐speaking verbally able children with ASD and 31 typically‐developing (TD) controls. Participants completed two tasks, namely, a low‐verbal multiple‐choice sentence‐picture matching task that tested their ability to comprehend conventional predicate metaphors, and a sentence continuation task that assessed their ability to generate metaphors. The study also included measures of fluid intelligence, expressive vocabulary, and working memory within the sample. The results show that the ASD group had significantly lower performance than the TD group in both metaphor comprehension and production. The findings also reveal that expressive vocabulary skills were a key factor in the metaphor comprehension and production performance of the children with ASD. Working memory capacity was also found to correlate significantly with metaphor comprehension performance in the ASD group. Conversely, no correlations were found in the TD group with neither of the above factors. Of note, children with ASD generated significantly more inappropriate responses and no‐responses to the metaphor production task compared with the control group. The overall results reveal that children with ASD had difficulty with both comprehending and using metaphorical language. The findings also indicate that TD children may employ diverse cognitive strategies or rely on different underlying skills when processing metaphors compared with children with ASD. Lay Summary: Difficulties related to metaphor comprehension are commonly observed in ASD individuals. However, less is known about metaphor production abilities in ASD. In this study, we compared metaphor comprehension and production skills in 18 verbally able Greek‐speaking children with ASD and 31 TD children, and also examined the role of vocabulary knowledge and working memory in metaphor processing. The overall results show that both metaphor comprehension and production were more challenging for the children with ASD as compared with their TD peers. Furthermore, we found that vocabulary knowledge is a factor that significantly influences both metaphor comprehension and production performance of ASD participants. The study also reveals that metaphor comprehension abilities in children with ASD are based on working memory skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory of Mind has long been studied as a core weakness in autism spectrum disorder due to its relationship with social reciprocity, while bilingualism has been shown to compensate for autistic individuals' mentalizing weaknesses. However, our knowledge of the Theory of Mind developmental trajectories of bilingual and monolingual autistic children, as well as of the factors related to Theory of Mind development in autism spectrum disorder is still limited. The current study has examined first‐ and second‐order Theory of Mind skills in 21 monolingual and 21 bilingual autistic children longitudinally across three time points, specifically at ages 6, 9, and 12, and also investigated associations between Theory of Mind trajectories and trajectories of the children's language, intelligence and executive function skills. The results reveal that bilingual autistic children outperformed their monolingual peers in second‐order Theory of Mind at ages 9 and 12, and that intelligence and, especially, expressive vocabulary skills played a pivotal role in advancing bilingual autistic children's second‐order Theory of Mind development. On the other hand, monolingual autistic children only managed to capitalize on their language and intelligence resources at age 12. The findings highlight the importance of investigating bilingualism effects on autistic children's advanced cognitive abilities longitudinally. Lay Summary: The current study offers evidence on the developmental trajectories of both first‐ and second‐order Theory of Mind skills in 21 bilingual and 21 monolingual autistic children that were initially tested at age 6, and were then followed up at ages 9 and 12. The same children were also administered language, intelligence, and executive function tests across the three time points. The results show that bilingualism improved autistic children's second‐order Theory of Mind skills after age 9, while this boosting effect was driven by the children's expressive vocabulary and intelligence skills. The findings emphasize the beneficial effects of bilingualism on autistic children's advanced Theory of Mind, and also highlight the importance of language and intelligence underlying this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impairments in the broader domain of pragmatics are considered to be a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A challenging aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to process nonliteral language. Interestingly, previous studies in figurative language comprehension in ASD have demonstrated conflicting results regarding participants' performance. The main scientific debate focuses on the underlying skills which facilitate processing of nonliteral speech in ASD. Namely, Theory of Mind (ToM), language abilities and Executive functions (EFs) are regarded as factors affecting autistic individuals' performance. This review addresses figurative language comprehension in ASD in light of the above three interpretive accounts. We reviewed data from recent studies in this field concluding that autistic children indeed encounter systematic difficulties in the processing of non‐literal language. Moreover, only ToM and verbal skills were found to correlate the most with figurative language comprehension in ASD. Notably, we found that differences related to research methodology and tasks' properties may have led to discrepancies between studies' results. Finally, we argue that future studies should encompass in their experimental design figurative comprehension tasks with minimal linguistic demands and also measures of ToM, verbal ability and EFs in order to shed more light in the independent contribution of those skills to the processing of nonliteral language in ASD. Lay Summary: Difficulties related to figurative language processing are commonly observed among autistic individuals. However both the extent and the exact source of these difficulties remain controversial. We reviewed studies from the last decade examining the processing of different subtypes of nonliteral language in ASD, including metaphors, idioms and verbal irony with a focus on the role of ToM, language abilities, and EFs in figurative language comprehension. This review highlights the importance of using low‐verbal nonliteral language tasks and argues that ToM, language skills, and EFs may have independent contributions to autistic individuals' ability to process nonliteral forms of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligence profiles in autism have been characterized by great variability. The questions of how autistic children's intelligence changes over time, and what factors influence these changes deserve study as part of efforts to document child autism profiles, but also because the relationship between intellectual functioning and children's background characteristics is poorly understood, particularly in a longitudinal context. A total of 39 autistic children and 39 age‐matched neurotypical children (5–9 years old) completed two IQ assessments at preschool age and up to 4 years later. Repeated‐measures analyses assessed longitudinal changes in the children's verbal (VIQ), performance (PIQ), and full‐scale IQ (FSIQ) at group level. We further sought to identify clusters with distinct profiles in each group by adopting an unsupervised K‐means clustering approach, and detect possible between‐subgroup differences in terms of children's socioeconomic status and autism severity. The largest cluster in the autistic group was composed of children whose PIQ significantly dropped at follow‐up, while the second largest cluster improved in all quotients; the smallest cluster, wherein children had more highly educated mothers than the rest of the clusters, was characterized by large improvement in VIQ. For the neurotypical children, there was a two‐cluster division; the majority of them improved in the three quotients, while very few dropped in PIQ at follow‐up. The relation between socioeconomic status and IQ changes was significant for both groups. The findings demonstrate both the complexity of intelligence changes in autism and the need to view this complexity through the lens of the children's socioeconomic diversity. Lay Summary: The development of autistic children's intellectual skills is characterized by great variability which remains poorly understood. In the current study, we investigated the developmental trajectories of verbal IQ, performance IQ, and full‐scale IQ scores of autistic children who were first assessed on their intellectual functioning skills at preschool age and were followed‐up at the age of 9. Results showed distinct profiles of IQ changes in the autistic group which were significantly affected by the children's socioeconomic background. The study demonstrates that a dimensional perspective to IQ in autism that takes into consideration children's socioeconomic background might better inform our understanding of how their intelligence develops over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the cognitive flexibility performance of young autistic children and a group of neurotypical peers. Thirty‐six autistic children (72–83 months) and 200 age‐matched typically‐developing children were assessed on the Children's Color Trails Test (CCTT), a semantic and a phonemic verbal fluency task. The results showed that the autistic children performed worse than their neurotypical peers in the switching component of the CCTT. In the fluency tests, the autistic group generated overall fewer word items than their neurotypical peers, however, their poorer performance was driven by specific linguistic stimuli in the fluency tasks. The findings suggest that cognitive flexibility for the autistic children was affected in the nonverbal CCTT only, while poor performance in semantic and phonemic fluency seemed to be inherent to the language properties of the verbal fluency tasks. Lay Summary: The current study aims to determine whether the Children's Color Trails Test (CCTT) and verbal (semantic and phonemic) fluency tasks are appropriate to assess cognitive flexibility in young autistic children. The overall findings showed poor performance for the autistic children in the CCTT. On the other hand, verbal fluency performance seemed to be driven by language features specific to the semantic and the phonemic fluency tasks rather than by difficulties in cognitive flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of autism worldwide has risen steadily in the last two decades, while bilingualism is also becoming increasingly prevalent in today's rapidly globalizing world. The current study aimed to investigate bilingualism effects in the pronoun resolution skills of children with autism in comparison to age‐matched monolingual children with autism, as well as monolingual and bilingual children of typical development (Ν = 20 participants per group). Results showed that autistic children had general difficulty anchoring ambiguous pronouns to entities that were linguistically expressed in discourse, yet, the bilingual children with autism were more sensitive to the topicality of the entities in syntactic subject position and more prone to identify them as suitable referents of ambiguous null pronouns as compared to their monolingual peers. The findings suggest that bilingualism is not detrimental to autistic children's pronoun resolution skills. The current study aimed at determining how bilingualism influences ambiguous pronoun comprehension in children with autism as compared to bilingual and monolingual children of typical development. The findings show that bilingualism was not detrimental to the autistic children's pronoun resolution skills, further suggesting that having acquired more than one language does not exacerbate autistic children's deficits in the comprehension of pronouns. Lay Summary: The current study aimed at determining how bilingualism influences ambiguous pronoun comprehension in children with autism as compared to bilingual and monolingual children of typical development. The findings show that bilingualism was not detrimental to the autistic children's pronoun resolution skills in, further suggesting that having acquired more than one language does not exacerbate autistic children's deficits in the comprehension of pronouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined whether bilingualism boosts Theory of Mind as measured by a non‐verbal false belief (FB) task in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and how this potential boost may stem from improvements in a variety of other domains, namely executive functions (EFs), language, metalinguistic awareness skills, as well as autism severity. One hundred and three children with ASD (7‐ to 15‐year‐olds) (43 bilingual and 60 age‐ and IQ‐matched monolingual children) were tested on a nonverbal task of attentional switching, working memory and updating task, and an online, low‐verbal first‐order FB task. Results showed a clear FB benefit for bilingual children with ASD as compared with their monolingual peers. There were also boosts in EF, however, there is no evidence that these EF boosts drove the FB advantage. Enhanced FB was not explained either by language, metalinguistic skills, or lower autism severity. While the results do not conclusively settle the debate on what triggers the ToM advantage in bilingual children with ASD, the empirical picture of the current study suggests that the ToM component of FB understanding in bilingual children with ASD is enhanced by the bilingual experience per se. Lay Summary The current study aimed to determine if and how bilingualism may improve the ability to understand others' beliefs in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We assessed their belief reasoning alongside a series of other skills hypothesized to be beneficial for such reasoning, namely understanding, producing, and thinking about language, recalling and switching between information, and the severity of their autistic symptoms. The overall findings highlight advantages for bilingual children with ASD over their monolingual peers for grasping beliefs, thus suggesting that pursuing bilingualism may be beneficial for cognition in ASD. Other boosts were also associated with bilingualism, such as recalling and switching between information, but these boosts were not directly related to belief understanding, highlighting the beneficial role of bilingualism per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]