Metaphorical priming in a lexical decision task in high functioning autism

The difficulties experienced by autistic individuals with regard to communication and language are widely known and well documented. Individuals with High functioning autism (ASD) are distinguished by relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive skills. However, problems with pragmatic language skills have been consistently reported across the autistic spectrum, even when structural language is intact. Many studies establish failure to understand metaphors, idioms and other forms of figurative language (Gold & Faust, 2010; Vulchanova, Talcott, Vulchanov & Stankova, 2012). Figurative language takes many forms, conceptual metaphors being one of the most common. On the cognitive level, conceptual metaphors are the mental representations we establish in order to map between two domains (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Fauconnier 1985; Vulchanova, Saldaña, Chahboun & Vulchanov 2015). In other words, the logic of one conceptual domain is applied to another.