When the Proverb Lands Wrong: Figurative Language in Autism and Dyslexia

If you sit with autistic or dyslexic children for any length of time, you already know that "she has her head in the clouds" can land as a literal weather report. What this study does is force two clinical groups that we usually treat as cognitively distinct — autism and dyslexia — into the same matched design and ask: do they fail figurative language for the same reasons, or different ones? The answer is interesting. Surface performance is similar. The mechanisms are not.

What the data shows

Pelekanou and Andreou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and University of Thessaly) recruited 105 upper-elementary children, 35 per group, matched on chronological age (M = 10.5, SD = 1), gender, and nonverbal reasoning. Figurative competence was assessed across idioms and proverbs. Both clinical groups underperformed TD controls on every measure — and crucially, ASD and dyslexia did not differ from each other.

Proverbs were the universal stumbling block. For all three groups, idioms (more conventional, more frequently exposed in oral culture) were easier than proverbs (which demand stripping a concrete narrative down to an abstract claim). The gap between proverbs and idioms widened sharply in the clinical groups — proverbs require precisely the analogical second-step that both diagnoses tax in different ways.

Regression untangled the mechanisms. In TD kids, figurative competence rose with age and with reading comprehension — the expected developmental trajectory. In ASD and dyslexia, structural language (receptive vocabulary, morphosyntax) was the dominant predictor. Same surface deficit, different routes in. The ASD group was also more heterogeneous than the dyslexia group, with comparatively milder language impairments — which fits the increasingly accepted picture of ASD as a disorder of profile, not severity.

For your practice

For SLPs and child therapists, this is a directive piece of data. If a child with ASD or dyslexia is missing a metaphor in session, the intervention target is not "explain figurative language" — it is the upstream structural language layer. Vocabulary depth and morphosyntactic processing are doing the work. Proverbs in particular should be flagged as the harder edge case: do not assume that a child who handles "raining cats and dogs" can handle "still waters run deep."

For psychotherapists working with adolescents on the autism spectrum, the implication runs into clinical metaphor itself. Therapeutic metaphors — the "container," the "weight you're carrying," the "wall" — are proverbs in disguise. They demand the same analogical lift that proverbs require. Before deploying a metaphor as an intervention, the question is no longer "is this a good metaphor" but "does this client's structural language let the metaphor land." The same metaphor that opens a door for a typically developing teenager may close one for an autistic teenager who hears it literally and doubts your competence.

The clinical move I take from this: when working with neurodivergent clients, lead with the concrete and let the figurative arrive later — earned, not imposed. Check comprehension with a paraphrase task. If the client cannot restate the metaphor in their own concrete terms, the metaphor has not yet landed.