Accounting for the preference for literal meanings in autism spectrum conditions

SUBMITTED ARTICLE Accounting for the preference for literal meanings in autism spectrum conditions Agustín Vicente 1 | Ingrid Lossius Falkum 2 1 Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, Ikerbasque & University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Biscay, Spain 2 Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies (ILN)/Department of Philosophy Classics, History of Art and Ideas (IFIKK), University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Correspondence Agustín Vicente, Micaela Portilla Research Centre, Justo Vélez de Elorriaga, 1, 01006, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. Email: [email protected] Funding information Ekonomiaren Garapen eta Lehiakortasun Saila, Eusko Jaurlaritza, Grant/Award Number: IT1396-19; Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Grant/Award Number: GIU18/221; H2020 European Research Council, Grant/Award Number: 853211; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci on, Grant/Award Number: PGC2018-093464-B-I00 Pragmatic difficulties are considered a hallmark of autism spectrum conditions (ASC), but remain poorly understood. We discuss and evaluate existing hypotheses regarding the literalism of ASC individuals, that is, their tendency for literal interpretations of non-literal communicative intentions. We present evidence that reveals a developmental stage at which neurotypical children also have a tendency for literalism and suggest an explanation for such behaviour that links it to other behavioural, rule-following, patterns typical of that age. We discuss evidence showing that strict adherence to rules is also widespread in ASC, and suggest that literalism might be linked to such rule-following behaviour. KEYWORDS autism spectrum conditions, development, literalism, pragmatics, rule-following behaviour 1|INTRODUCTION What a speaker means by an utterance typically goes beyond the literal meanings of the words and sentences she has used. A key assumption underlying contemporary theories of human communication is that appropriate use and interpretation of language involves pragmatics skills—that is, the inferential capacities that enable us to bridge the gap between linguistic Received: 7 July 2020 Revised: 29 March 2021 Accepted: 30 March 2021 DOI: 10.1111/mila.12371 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. © 2021 The Authors. Mind & Language published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Mind & Language. 2023;38:119–140. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mila 119 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License (literal/conventional) meanings and speaker meanings in context (see, e.g., Carston, 2002; Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995). Impairments in such pragmatic reasoning abilities, that is, difficulties with appropriate use and interpretation of language, are considered a hallmark of autism spectrum conditions (ASC) (Tager-Flusberg, Paul & Lord, 2005). In particular, individuals diagnosed with ASC are said to be excessively literalists, in the sense that they tend to prefer literal interpretations of words and utterances, even when speakers have non-literal intentions (Chahboun, Vulchanov, Saldaña, Eshuis & Vulchanova, 2016,2017; Vulchanova, Talcott, Vulchanov & Stankova, 2012; Walenski & Love, 2017; see Section 2.4 for discussion of the evidence). 1,2 Recently, however, some studies have suggested that the largely heterogenous population of ASC individuals may not be characterised by global pragmatic impairments (Hochstein, Bale & Barner, 2018), and that many high functioning ASC individuals are able to understand scalar implicatures (Van Tiel & Kissine, 2018) metaphors (Kasirer & Mashal, 2016), and even irony (Glenwright & Agbayewa, 2012). However, it is still true that most individuals on the spectrum have difficulties understanding non-literal uses of language, the underlying causes of which are debated (Norbury, 2014). Moreover, when a literalist bias is tested (as in Chahboun et al., 2016, 2017; Walenski & Love, 2017), the suggestion is that such difficulties relate to such literalist bias, and not just to difficulties with non-literal uses of language that may also appear in other conditions, such as in developmental language disorders (DLD: see below). Hypotheses include an impairment in “theory of mind”abilities (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985) and consequent difficulties in understanding the speaker's intention (Happé, 1993; Rundblad & Annaz, 2010a), “weak central coherence,”which biases towards local, detail-focused rather than global information processing and makes the integration of contextual information difficult (Happé, 1999), executive dysfunction (Hill, 2004) which impedes inhibition of the literal meaning and flexibility in going beyond rigid, literal interpretations, and lack of sufficient semantic/world knowledge (Norbury, 2014). Despite considerable research attention, the pragmatic difficulties with non-literal uses in ASC are still poorly understood. In this paper, we discuss and evaluate existing hypotheses regarding the literalism of ASC individuals, and link them to accounts of pragmatic development in neurotypical children. While there appears to be a developmental stage at which neurotypical children also have a tendency for literal interpretations (Asch & Nerlove, 1960; Falkum, Recasens & Clark, 2017; Köder & Falkum, 2020; Levorato & Cacciari, 2002; Nerlich, Clarke & Todd, 1999; Winner, 1988/1997), we know of no studies that have explicitly investigated whether ASC individuals' pragmatic difficulties could be linked to the same source as those that neurotypical children experience at a certain stage in pragmatic development. We discuss a possible explanation for the tendency for literal interpretations in neurotypical children, one that links it to other behavioural, rule-following, patterns typical of the pre-primary and early primary school age. Finally, considering extant evidence that shows that strict adherence to rules is also a widespread feature in ASC, we suggest that literalism might be linked to such rulefollowing behaviour. 1 Vulchanova et al. (2012) is a case study about EV, a Bulgarian woman with outstanding language learning skills. They ran a number of tests on her L1 and L2 competence and compared it to a control group: Among other things, she scored much lower than controls on idiom comprehension and her incorrect responses contained “literal interpretations”(p. 20). 2 Besides the empirical evidence we will discuss, there is ample evidence that autistic people exhibit a literalist bias in their daily lives (A. C. Wilson & Bishop, 2021). See also: https://autismguide.co.uk/fitting-into-the-world/being-autisticaspergers-syndrome-and-understanding-idioms-or-common-phrases/. 120 VICENTE AND FALKUM 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we discuss how the different cognitive impairments underlying existing hypotheses may impact on the literalist preference observed in ASC, how they relate to one another, and how existing explanations are all unsatisfactory in one (specific) way or another. We also point out that they cannot explain a different set of data, which we introduce in Section 3, namely, that in the neurotypical development, children aged three to four seem to be less literalist than children aged five to six. In Section 4, we introduce our own hypothesis, which is that such preference for literalist interpretations is an expression of a broader conventionalist attitude, probably derived from the difficulties that ASC people experience when trying to understand the social world in general. While it is still possible that the literalism of ASC people has a different origin than the literalism of 5-year-old neurotypicals, it is dubious that their literalism is related to factors that cannot explain the nonliteralism of 3-year-olds and the observed difference between 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds. 2|LITERALISM AND ITS EXPLANATIONS What does it mean to be a “literalist”? Most, if not all, words have several different meanings, and there is no reason to pick up one of them as the literal meaning. So, in a first pass, we will take it that someone is a literalist if he or she has a strong tendency towards understanding words and utterances as expressing one of their conventional meanings instead of some novel, ad hoc, meaning. According to this approach, a literalist person should not necessarily have problems understanding conventionalized metaphors or metonymies, given that these can be stored in the lexicon inthesamewayasordinary“literal”meanings. However, for a literalist, acquiring the meaning of a conventional metaphor or metonym should also be more costly than usual, and we should see a deficit in their comprehension and production of conventional metaphors and metonymies. Comprehension and production of conventional idiomatic expressions should also be affected: A literalist will typically process an idiomatic expression compositionally and may not even realise that the expression has to have another meaning. A non-literalist who hears an idiomatic expression for the first time is likely to be aware that it does not mean what it compositionally means, even if they do not understand what the expression means. In contrast, a literalist may not even consider that the nonsensical combination of words has to have another sense. 2.1 |Executive dysfunction As said above, there are several hypotheses as to why ASC individuals are, overall, more literalist than their neurotypical peers. One hypothesis relates literalism to executive dysfunction (Hill, 2004). Executive function refers broadly to a set of cognitive abilities that are necessary for the cognitive control of behaviour, including inhibition, mental flexibility and working memory (Diamond, 2013). Individually, a deficit in each of these abilities could, in principle, lead to a tendency for literal interpretations of figuratively used expressions. An impairment in inhibitory control could make it difficult to suppress preponderant literal meanings, poor mental flexibility could make switching from one meaning (literal) to another (figurative) difficult, and a scarcity of working memory capacity could make it difficult to simultaneously process an expression's literal and figurative meaning. It is a matter of debate whether executive function is globally impaired across the spectrum (Friedman & Sterling, 2019; Johnston, Murray, Spain, Walker & Russell, 2019) or whether it is VICENTE AND FALKUM 121 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License a core deficit in autism (Demetriou et al., 2018). ASC individuals may perform differently on particular sub-tasks involving executive function. For instance, on the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935), a classic test of inhibitory control where subjects have to inhibit a preponderant behaviour (e.g., the response primed by the colour of a colour word), some studies have shown that ASC children and adolescents are unimpaired (Ozonoff & Jensen, 1999; Russell, Jarrold & Hood, 1999), while others find general patterns of deficits in inhibitory control (H. M. Geurts, van den Bergh & Ruzzano, 2014). Several studies have shown impairments in cognitive flexibility in ASC, more specifically on task-switching using the Wisconsin card sorting test (WCST) (Landry & Al-Taie, 2016; Willcutt, Sonuga-Barke, Nigg & Sergeant, 2008), and lower scores on measures of working memory (Boucher, Mayes & Bigham, 2012; Kercooda, Grskovicb, Bandac & Begesked, 2014). In a meta-review, however, Friedman and Sterling (2019) show that many ASC individuals perform as well as neurotypicals on each of these constructs (but, see Demetriou et al., 2018). This does not show that executive dysfunction may not be responsible for literalism in the ASC population, as there might be a correlation between executive dysfunction and literalism (i.e., persons on the spectrum who have executive dysfunction also have problems interpreting language non-literally). If there exists such a correlation, this could, as we mentioned above, be for various reasons: lack of inhibition of the literal meaning; inflexibility in switching from one interpretation to another; or difficulties with having two different possible meanings in working memory. An assumption underlying this family of explanations is that literal meanings of words are always activated. However, as Glucksberg (2008) claims: “Literal meanings do not have unconditional priority, and so they are not necessarily easier to compute than nonliteral meanings” (see also D. Wilson & Carston, 2007). For instance, some models of metaphor processing have it that metaphorical meanings are accessed directly, without prior analysis of the complete literal meaning (Gibbs, 1994,2002). Other models grant that relevant features of the literal meaning are activated and then suppressed (Rubio-Fern andez, 2007), but suppression of features does not have to be the same as inhibition of a competing meaning. Suppression of features is also involved in understanding complex nominal expressions such as stone lion (Hogeweg, 2012) and fake gun (Del Pinal, 2015), processes that have been shown to be less costly than for instance, homonymy resolution (e.g., bank,pupil), where it seems necessary to inhibit a preponderant meaning to get to the intended, subordinate meaning (Frisson, 2009). That is, it is possible that inhibition is not involved in typical non-literal meaning processing after all. The same kind of reasoning casts initial doubt on the working memory hypothesis. ASC individuals have been shown to have reduced working memory capacity (WM) (Habib, Harris, Pollick & Melville, 2019). According to this view, the observed literalism could be a result of poor WM: It is not that ASC individuals cannot inhibit a particular piece of information (a literal meaning), but that they have difficulties having two different pieces of information in WM at the same time. So the question about literalism could ultimately be a question of being unable to hold two different interpretations of one word in WM, one literal and one non-literal, until one of them is selected. However, once again we do not really know whether retrieving a non-literal meaning involves accessing a literal meaning first and holding it in WM until it is discarded. Homonymy resolution seems to work like this (Swinney, 1979). Typically, the most frequent meaning is accessed while context also activates an alternative meaning; then there is competition between both meanings, and the dominant meaning decays (or is inhibited). In this case, it may well be that both meanings are temporarily held in WM, and so that a poor WM capacity may give rise to problems with homonymy resolution. However, as we have discussed above, comprehension of non-literal uses such as metaphors, metonymies, hyperboles and other 122 VICENTE AND FALKUM 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License kinds of departures from conventional meaning does not necessarily work like this, that is, there may not be competition between the literal and the figurative meaning. Moreover, the evidence concerning homonymy resolution in ASC does not suggest that individuals on the spectrum are unable to retrieve a subordinate meaning of a homonym (Hahn, Snedeker & Rabagliati, 2015). One study, however, found that ASC individuals have difficulties disambiguating homographs in a reading task (L opez & Leekam, 2003): Subjects chose the dominant pronunciation even when the context made clear that such pronunciation was not adequate (tear in tear on her face; dominant vs. tear in the clothes; subordinate). However, it is unclear whether these results concerning pronunciation disambiguation carry over to meaning disambiguation. If homonymy resolution is not seriously compromised in ASC individuals, the suggestion is that the difficulties concerning literalism are not related to inhibition or WM, both of which seem to be involved in homonymy resolution. However, caution is advised: Given the heterogeneity of the spectrum, evidence concerning homonymy resolution would bear on the issue of literalism only if subjects who are able to disambiguate homonyms also show a strong preference for literal interpretations. We do not know of any study that has compared homonymy resolution and figurative meaning understanding in the same group of subjects. Note that both the lack of inhibition and the WM explanations work well only if it is the case that literal meanings do receive a strong activation in the processing of non-literal uses of words and sentences. In the lack of inhibition explanation, literal meanings receive such a strong activation that they must be inhibited; in the WM explanation, literal meanings are accessed and fill out WM completely, given the assumed WM shortcomings in ASC. However, for all we know, that may happen only if the subject is already a literalist, that is, if literal meanings are more strongly activated than in the general population. Someone with inhibition or WM deficits would lean towards literal interpretations in figurative contexts only if such literal interpretations receive an atypical strong activation. The same kind of considerations apply to explanations that involve a deficit in cognitive flexibility, a component of executive function involved in task switching. There is in principle no reason why a deficit in flexibility understood in this way should make non-literal meanings unavailable (again, unless one is already a literalist). However, flexibility may also have a broader, vaguer, meaning related to the more general rigidity that is observed in the behaviour and cognition of ASC individuals. The proposal about why some ASC individuals tends to be literalists, which we will outline in Section 4, could be understood as involving flexibility and linked to rigidity about social conventions in general. However, “flexibility”here would just be a descriptive term that applies to characteristic patterns of behaviour observed in ASC. 2.2 |Theory of mind A second major contender is theory of mind (ToM) capacities. According to the ToM account, ASC individuals tend to be literalists because they have difficulties reasoning about others' mental states, including inferring what the speaker intends to communicate by her use of language (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Baron-Cohen, Baldwin & Crowson, 1997; Happé, 1993). This hypothesis has its roots in pragmatic accounts of linguistic understanding which assume that the ability to infer speaker meanings is essentially a form of mentalistic reasoning (e.g., Grice, 1975/1989; Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995). In a seminal study, Happé (1993)founda correlation between first-order theory of mind and metaphor understanding, and second-order theory of mind and irony understanding in ASC individuals, supporting the ToM account of VICENTE AND FALKUM 123 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License pragmatic difficulties in ASC (see also Martin & McDonald, 2004; Whyte & Nelson, 2015). However, recent research has questioned the view that many of the pragmatic challenges in ASC are duetoToMdeficits,foralongtimebelievedtobewidespreadacrossthespectrum(butseeFrith, Happé & Siddons, 1994; Gernsbacher & Yergeau, 2019, for reasons to be sceptical about this view). First, there are studies that show that pragmatic reasoning is not universally impaired across the spectrum, and that some ASC individuals are able to handle pragmatic phenomena that are assumed to require inferences about the speaker's intentions. Examples are scalar implicatures (Chevallier, Wilson, Happé & Noveck, 2010;Hochsteinetal.,2018), metaphor (Norbury, 2005) and even irony (e.g., Chevallier, Noveck, Happé & Wilson, 2011). Other studies suggest that there may be no or only a weak correlation between ToM measures and non-literal understanding (e.g., Norbury, 2005). Even Happé's original study found that those ASC subjects who passed all ToM tests performed worse than typically developing adults on certain types of stories involving non-literal uses of language, so a ToM deficit is unlikely to be the whole story. Yet, it is still widely assumed both that ToM abilities are recruited for irony comprehension and other departures from literal meaning that routinely require mentalistic reasoning, and that the root of the problems ASC people experience with such departures is a scarce ToM capacity (Andrés-Roqueta & Katsos, 2020). Recently, it has been suggested that mentalistic reasoning need not underlie all pragmatic inferencing (Andrés-Roqueta & Katsos, 2020; Jary, 2013;Kissine,2016). Jary (2013)has argued that even if we assumed that accessing a non-literal meaning involves pragmatic inferencing (calculating implicatures), many implicatures do not require mentalistic reasoning. For instance, if you say “I'm thirsty”and you get the response “The bathroom is over there,”Jary claims that you do not need to reason about the speaker's intentions in order to derive the implicature You can drink water there. The only things you need, according to Jary, are world knowledge and associative capacity. A less extreme position is taken by Andrés-Roqueta and Katsos (2020), who distinguish between linguistic and social pragmatics (for a similar proposal, see B. Geurts, Kissine & van Tiel, 2019): Whereas social pragmatics implies representing the mental states of another person, linguistic pragmatics seems to only require intact linguistic abilities, accompanied by enough world knowledge and associative capacity, as the speaker's meaning can be accessed from an egocentric perspective. According to Andrés-Roqueta and Katsos (2020), linguistic pragmatics prototypically includes scalar implicatures and indirect requests, while irony is the paradigm case of social pragmatics. While we do not wish to take a stance on this debate regarding the role of ToM in pragmatic reasoning here, we believe that in principle, figurative uses of language, along with linguistic pragmatics, do not require explicit conjecturing about the mental states of the speaker. Again, one surely has to do some mentalistic reasoning (e.g., “Why does she say that Lawyers are sharks, which is obviously false? What could she be meaning?”etc.) if one already has a strong tendency towards understanding things literally. If one is initially more flexible about what words can express, processing a non-literal meaning can be a much simpler affair (e.g., Recanati, 2004; D. Wilson & Carston, 2007). In a much-cited study, Norbury (2005) suggests that language abilities, and not ToM, predict figurative language abilities. Her study, which compared children with ASC (with or without language impairment) with children with developmental language disorder (DLD), showed that children with language impairment, with or without concurrent autistic features, have difficulties with metaphor understanding (see also Bühler, Perovic & Pouscoulous, 2018). To explain this, Norbury proposes that in order to understand a metaphor subjects need intact analogical reasoning (which ASC individuals apparently have: Morsanyi, Stamenkovi c & Holyoak, 2019) and the world knowledge required to grasp the analogy. Children with language delay may lack the required world knowledge due to shortage 124 VICENTE AND FALKUM 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License in their vocabulary or linguistic input in general. Thus, difficulties in metaphor understanding, according to Norbury, would derive from purely linguistic issues. While there are several problematic aspects of this study, which we will come back to in Section 2.4., ToM abilities do not uniformly predict figurative meaning understanding in atypical populations (see, e.g., Langdon, Davies & Coltheart, 2002, on the relation between ToM and understanding of metaphor and irony in schizophrenia). However, as we have suggested, it might be that individuals who already have a strong literalist bias are forced to struggle with mentalistic reasoning in order to understand figurative uses of words. But again, an explanation for this literalist bias is required. 2.3 |Central coherence The next approach ascribes literalism in ASC to a weakness in so-called global or central coherence (CC), biasing towards local, detail-focused rather than global information processing, making the integration of contextual information difficult (Happé, 1999). Weak central coherence is observed in perception, where ASC individuals are reported to be less sensitive to overall gestalts and more attentive to details (Plaisted, Saksida, Alc antara & Weisblatt, 2003). In language understanding, a weakness in global coherence means that the person will be less sensitive to contextual elements. Thus, there will be a difficulty in the integration of contextual factors, and the person may go word by word in interpreting a linguistic utterance. In principle, we think this could be a plausible account of the attested literalism of ASC individuals. However, following (Happé & Frith, 2006), there are two, apparently different ways in which weak CC could affect processing of non-literal utterances. According to the first, weak CC implies that subjects focus on features and details instead of getting the global gist. According to the second, weak CC implies that subjects have difficulties in processing anything that departs, even slightly, from the things they are familiar with. Here they quote Kanner's (1943, p. 246) original observation: “Asituation,aperformance,asentence is not regarded as complete if it is not made up of exactly the same elements that were present at the time the child was first confronted with it. If the slightest ingredient is altered or removed, the total situation is no longer the same and therefore is not accepted as such.” According to this second idea, individuals with ASC may be literalists because they are fixated on the literal meanings that “were present at the time the child was confronted with [the words].” 3 However, if weak CC is simply a deficit in getting the global gist, it is not obvious that someone with such a condition should be unable to go beyond literal meanings. Weak CC is invoked in accounting for ASC children's difficulties using sentence context to disambiguate homographs (L opez & Leekam, 2003) but, as we have already mentioned, it is far from clear that the processes or mechanisms underlying understanding of non-literal uses of language are similar to those involved in resolving ambiguities. In addition, as also mentioned, there are studies of homonymy resolution suggesting that ASC children are unimpaired compared to TD children (Hahn et al., 2015). It may also be the case that central coherence is involved in understanding some types of non-literal uses but not in others. For instance, idiomatic expressions (Vulchanova, Saldaña, Chahboun & Vulchanov, 2015) may be harder and may require a gestalt interpretation that is not required in understanding, for instance, metonymy, metaphor, hyperbole or other loose uses of words. In sum, we do not know how much of CC that is required in order to reach non-literal 3 This implies that they might be literalist about some “non-literal”meanings as well, if these were the first meanings that they were introduced to. VICENTE AND FALKUM 125 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License interpretations. Finally, it is not clear whether processing a unit of the size of a sentence should be affected by weak CC. Weak CC may impact the ability to keep track of more or less complex, or simply long, narratives, but not necessarily on the capacity to understand a non-literal meaning (Tirado & Saldaña, 2016). In this respect, the studies by Brock, Norbury, Einav and Nation (2008) and Au-Yeung, Kaakinen, Liversedge and Benson (2018) suggest that context-integration in small linguistic units is unproblematic in autism. 2.4 |Linguistic–semantic ability According to Norbury (2005), the reason why many people diagnosed with ASC tend to have difficulties understanding metaphors is to be found in their poorer linguistic abilities compared to their typically developing peers. On this view, difficulties with metaphor comprehension are not exclusive to ASC, but common to all conditions in which linguistic abilities is compromised. Recently, Bühler et al. (2018) conducted a study which they take to support Norbury's view, showing that children with developmental language disorder also have problems understanding metaphor and that their performance is not related to non-verbal intelligence. Norbury (2005) suggests that metaphor understanding requires a degree of semantic knowledge that people with linguistic delay or linguistic impairment lack. However, it is unclear what such semantic knowledge amounts to. If this is world knowledge derived from scarce linguistic input, as Norbury herself proposes (e.g., the world knowledge required to grasp an analogy or shared properties of different entities), the real issue is not linguistic, but cognitive-conceptual (cf. Keil, 1986). But it can also be a question of competence in lexical integration following compositional rules, which would be properly semantic knowledge, or ease of processing, which is more of a performance issue. Moreover, as Norbury's study used the test of word knowledge (TOWK) as a measure of participants' linguistic ability/semantic knowledge, which contains both metaphors and other types of figurative language, the correlation she found with metaphor understanding is not surprising (Rundblad & Annaz, 2010b). In any case, at least with respect to ASC, the evidence is far from clear cut: For instance, Chahboun et al. (2017) matched a group of ASC adults with a group of neurotypical adults by linguistic abilities, and found that ASC adults were slower in a lexical decision task involving metaphors. That is, even if linguistic impairments may predict difficulties with non-literal meaning understanding, such difficulties may persist in the absence of linguistic impairment. A lack of world knowledge may explain why someone is unable to retrieve the shared properties between the source and the target in a metaphor. However, literalism in the interpretation of metonymy, certain types of implicatures or irony has to have a different kind of explanation. According to some researchers who find Norbury's account compelling (AndrésRoqueta & Katsos, 2020), difficulties with irony comprehension can be explained by ToM deficits, while difficulties with scalar implicatures or other kinds of figurative meaning are anchored in structural language problems (i.e., vocabulary and grammar). 4 This kind of approach is unable to explain an overall literalist tendency in subjects who do not have language impairment. But, beyond that, the approach lacks an explanation as to how what they call “structural language”problems impact figurative meaning understanding. And even if we 4 This kind of account does not address the issue of particularised implicatures like the ones Jary (2013) calls “material implicatures,”which, at least in principle, may not require mentalistic reasoning. A. C. Wilson and Bishop (2021) report issues with this kind of implicatures as well. 126 VICENTE AND FALKUM 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License assume that linguistic problems predict difficulties with figurative meanings, it is still unclear how linguistic problems would have an impact on flexibility in comprehension in general. Given that we as yet lack an explanation for the relation between these two factors, it cannot be excluded that the relation holds in virtue of a third factor. For instance, it could be that people who in general have problems comprehending others tend to follow linguistic conventions more strictly. Finally, a capital question about the task design in Norbury (2005) is to what extent the kind of dichotomous paradigm she uses tells us much about literalism (i.e., the tendency to interpret language literally). This question also applies to other studies that take their results to support the structural language hypothesis (Bühler et al., 2018; Norbury, 2004). Regardless of the type of assessment chosen by the authors (which varies from multiple-choice tasks to verbal explanations), the problem lies in their labelling answers as either correct or incorrect, without further discrimination. This may obscure literalist patterns in the incorrect answers. In Norbury's (2005) study, literalism is not even tested. The study only tests whether subjects can discriminate which candidate is the best metaphor, with tasks such as: “The heating had been left on overnight and the room was very warm. It was: a. an oven b. a blanket c. a grill d. a spice (Norbury, 2005, p. 399) While this paradigm tests whether subjects can comprehend metaphors it leaves no room for testing whether subjects interpret metaphors literally or not. Even studies that have a different design and include a literalist option, such as Kasirer and Mashal's (2014,2016) studies on novel metaphors in ASC, or Norbury's (2004) study on idioms, are not fine-grained enough to uncover a literalist bias. As mentioned above, these studies only consider “correct”and “incorrect”responses, without further exploration, such that a literalist response will not be distinguished from any other “bad”choice. Therefore, these studies cannot reflect whether autistic subjects exhibit a characteristic pragmatic style when faced with figurative meaning. Rather, they only indicate that individuals who have language delay also have difficulties with figurative language. Several studies show that people with language delay have problems understanding figurative language or idiomatic expressions (e.g., Bühler et al., 2018). Autistic individuals with language delay have those same problems (as do second language learners). What is not further explored is whether autistic people (or people with DLD, for that matter) also exhibit a literalist bias. Having issues with figurative language is not equal to having a literalist bias. Testing for the former does not mean that the latter is tested. Even a “correct”response need not mean that figurative language has been processed in a “typical”way. Figurative meanings may incur higher processing cost. So, it is possible that autistic people who give correct responses still exhibit a literalist bias. That is, this kind of testing leaves open the possibility that people with ASC, whether showing language delay or not, may process figurative language differently than control populations. Other experimental paradigms, using reaction times, priming, or eye-movements, are more appropriate if the goal is to test a literalist bias. In general, testing for online performance seems preferable. For instance, Walenski and Love's (2017) priming study on idiom comprehension found that both TD and DLD individuals contrast with ASC subjects in that both TD and DLD VICENTE AND FALKUM 127 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License accommodate exceptions. The reason why rigidity in behaviour is made manifest in the social domain more than in others is simply because the social world is much less rulegoverned than others. There is little discussion as to how rigidity facets develop in time. Bishop et al. (2013) report increased circumscribed interests with greater age, but Strang et al. (2017) do not find such a relation. Strang et al. also mention that flexibility problems in general were less intense in the older participants in their study, but they recommend caution, since, as of today, there are no data from longitudinal studies. In the absence of such longitudinal studies, it is possible to speculate that high functioning (HF) ASC people may become more flexible about rules with time, once they realise that rule-following in neurotypicals admits many exceptions. Without being able to commit to suggesting any direct relationship, it seems that the same process of conscious realisation may drive improvements in working out non-literal uses of language in the course of HF autistic individuals development (who can attain a better understanding of figurative language, but not as good as TD adults: Chahboun et al., 2016,2017). In both cases, ASC individuals may remain rigid and literalists at the deepest level, while succeeding at meeting the challenges of the typicals' world. 5|CONCLUDING REMARKS We suggest that ASC individuals' fixation with literal meanings is part and parcel of this general fixation with rules in the social realm. The rationale behind this explanation of literalism in ASC is: (i) words have conventional meanings, but they are also used nonconventionally by speakers, such that understanding what speakers mean involves being able to not follow/be flexible about a conventional rule; (ii) there is some evidence showing that when subjects are more literalist, they are also more rigid about conventions in general; (iii) many ASC people are rigid concerning social rules (there being various reasons that could explain it), so it is to be expected that they are also rigid concerning rules about what words mean. In this section, we have tried to support step (iii) of the argument by identifying a behavioural trait common to many ASC individuals that is not often discussed: strict adherence to rules. This kind of rule following inflexibility also seems to be present in TD children of a certain age, who also display less flexibility concerning meaning interpretation (Section 2). There is reason to believe that both kinds of behaviours are related, as in the terrain of meaning interpretation there are also conventions as well as exceptions to such conventions. So, given that we think that most accounts of literalism in ASC are unconvincing and that we find in ASC people a trait that is plausibly related to the literalism we find in typical development, our suggestion is that literalism in ASC may be related to their overall being stricter about rules. We hope that this may open up a new direction for empirical research into the sources of ASC individuals' difficulties in this important domain of social cognition and communication. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Elena Castroviejo, Isabel Martín-Gonzalez, Valentina Petrolini and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions. This paper is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 853211). Funding for this research was also supported by Agencia Estatal de Investigaci on, Spain grant 134 VICENTE AND FALKUM 14680017, 2023, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12371 by Universidad Del Pais Vasco, Wiley Online Library on [08/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License number: PGC2018-093464-B-I00; by the Basque Government, grant number: IT1396-19; and by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), grant numbers: GIU18/221 and US20/03. DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study. 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