Aspects of metaphor understanding in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Metaphor - a way of creating new meanings based on similarity - is a very common phenomenon of language and speech. Everyday communication, fiction, journalistic and scientific texts are filled with metaphors. Younger students encounter metaphors when studying all subjects of the school curriculum, as well as in reading texts. Literary works for children also contain many metaphors and other figurative expressions. However, not all primary school students are equally successful in understanding metaphors, and some types of metaphors are difficult for all primary school students. Failure to understand metaphors by children can lead to learning and communication difficulties. Studying the ability to understand metaphorical expressions and identifying the factors that influence this ability is an urgent task necessary to prevent learning and socialization difficulties in children. For children with developmental disabilities, it is even more difficult to deal with metaphors. These difficulties can be associated with various factors specific to each type of dysontogenesis. Identifying and studying the factors influencing the understanding of metaphors will allow in the future to adjust the existing methods of working with children with developmental problems. By learning to use metaphors in our work, we will be able to expand the arsenal of remedial methods for each of the specific types of developmental disorders, contributing to better adaptation of children. The aim of our research was to examine the ability of children with autism to understand metaphors and to investigate the connection between the level of intelligence and the ability to understand metaphors. In this study, 7 Russian-speaking children were assessed according to their level of intellectual development, as well as their ability to understand metaphors through an act-out task using pictures. Based on the previous literature, we had several main expectations about our results: (1) children with autism have less understanding of metaphors than their normally developing peers; (2) difficulties in understanding metaphors in atypical development are associated with a general lag in intellectual development. The experiment carried out confirmed our initial hypothesis and revealed the presence of a connection between the level of intelligence and the ability to understand metaphors. Children with a level of intelligence below average performed significantly worse on the task proposed in the course of the study. The best results were shown by children with an average level of intelligence. Our research is just the first step towards examining how children with autism spectrum disorder understand metaphors. After a comprehensive analysis of the studies of Russian and foreign experts, we came to the conclusion that the stated topic is insufficiently studied. Therefore, our experiment will be able to provide additional information about the features of the Russian language. And how Russian-speaking children with autistic disorder understand metaphors. In further experiments, it is planned to study the ability of children to understand not only the metaphors depicted in the pictures, but also the metaphors contained in the text. Future results may contribute to the refinement of diagnostic and corrective work on the development of understanding of figurative meanings of words in children with autism and form the basis of programs for the correction of speech development in children with developmental disabilities.