Browsing by Author "Särkilahti, Elina"

Irony is a way of communicating a message in which words and their meaning is in conflict. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a tendency to interpret words literally which is a result of their problems in social interaction. It has been reported that people with ASD have difficulties to react to irony in a proper manner which leads to the assumption that they do not understand irony. In my Bachelors thesis I will review studies on irony comprehension of individuals with ASD. The aim of my review is to find from the literature if the assumption that individuals with ASD cannot detect irony is correct and what kind of explanations there are on the underlying issues of their difficulties in irony comprehension. Studies are quite contradictory on how well people with ASD can detect irony. Some suggest that individuals with ASD can detect irony as well as typically developed and others propose that people with ASD cannot detect irony even closely as well as typically developing. But studies are unanimous that people with ASD have great difficulties in the comprehension of irony compared to typically developing. There are many explanations why people with ASD might have difficulties with irony. One is that children with ASD lack the theory of mind, so they have problems in understanding that the speaker has his or her independent intentions that they might want to transmit to the listener when using irony. According to another explanation the disturbance in language development might influence irony perception. Sometimes tasks testing irony perception require the ability to produce difficult verbal outcomes which are difficult for people with ASD. They have also difficulties to perceive prosodic cues overall and irony has a wide variety of possible prosodic cues. In addition to the specific difficulties in, for example prosody and language, people with ASD also have hard time in integrating these multiple different cues automatically. However, there are compensatory mechanisms that help them to overcome these difficulties. They just do not automatically use them when processing language but if they are explicitly told to take in account that there might be irony individuals with ASD are doing better in irony tasks. For future research it would be important to study how well people with ASD detect irony in more natural situations. Furthermore, it should be studied how much they understand irony even when they recognize it because it has been shown that people with ASD do not enjoy irony as much as typically developing.