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Relationships Between Children's Preference of Literal or Nonliteral Meaning and Freshmen's Rating of Strangeness of These Meanings (numbers in parentheses indicate SD; tests were two-tailed). 

Relationships Between Children's Preference of Literal or Nonliteral Meaning and Freshmen's Rating of Strangeness of These Meanings (numbers in parentheses indicate SD; tests were two-tailed). 

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The present study aimed to clarify whether comprehension of ambiguous sentences in Japanese children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFASD) varies depending on the degree to which the use of these sentences is conventional. We examined the relationship between comprehension by children with HFASD and college freshmen's assessment of...

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Context 1
... 6 sentences (#1 to 6 in Table 2) of the 9 in which the intergroup difference was re- confirmed in terms of sentence interpreta- tion preference by children, the interpre- tation preferred more strongly by children with HFASD than by TD children was rated by the freshmen as significantly less strange in its combination with the sentence than the nonpreferred interpretation, regard- less of whether the interpretation was lit- eral or nonliteral. In 5 (#1 to 5) sentences for which the children with HFASD showed stronger preference for the nonliteral in- terpretation than did the TD children, the freshmen rated the sentence-nonliteral in- terpretation combinations as significantly less strange compared with the literal mean- ing (Mann-Whitney U-test, z scores were applied to calculate p and shown in Table 2, all p-values <.001). ...
Context 2
... 6 sentences (#1 to 6 in Table 2) of the 9 in which the intergroup difference was re- confirmed in terms of sentence interpreta- tion preference by children, the interpre- tation preferred more strongly by children with HFASD than by TD children was rated by the freshmen as significantly less strange in its combination with the sentence than the nonpreferred interpretation, regard- less of whether the interpretation was lit- eral or nonliteral. In 5 (#1 to 5) sentences for which the children with HFASD showed stronger preference for the nonliteral in- terpretation than did the TD children, the freshmen rated the sentence-nonliteral in- terpretation combinations as significantly less strange compared with the literal mean- ing (Mann-Whitney U-test, z scores were applied to calculate p and shown in Table 2, all p-values <.001). In one sentence (#6) where literal interpretation was preferred significantly more strongly by the children with HFASD than the TD children, the fresh- men rated the sentence-literal interpretation as significantly less strange (Mann-Whitney U, z score was applied to calculate p and shown in Table 2, p <.001). ...
Context 3
... 5 (#1 to 5) sentences for which the children with HFASD showed stronger preference for the nonliteral in- terpretation than did the TD children, the freshmen rated the sentence-nonliteral in- terpretation combinations as significantly less strange compared with the literal mean- ing (Mann-Whitney U-test, z scores were applied to calculate p and shown in Table 2, all p-values <.001). In one sentence (#6) where literal interpretation was preferred significantly more strongly by the children with HFASD than the TD children, the fresh- men rated the sentence-literal interpretation as significantly less strange (Mann-Whitney U, z score was applied to calculate p and shown in Table 2, p <.001). ...
Context 4
... chil- dren with HFASD preferred the nonliteral interpretation more strongly than TD chil- dren for these sentences. In 2 sentences (#7, 8) of these 3, the freshmen did not rate the sentence-literal interpretation combina- tion and the sentence-nonliteral interpreta- tion combination differently (Mann-Whitney U-test, z scores were applied to calculate p and shown in Table 2, both p-values N.S.). Finally, in 1 sentence (#9), the freshmen rat- ed the combination of the sentence and its literal interpretation less strange than that with its nonliteral interpretation. ...

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Citations

... The novelty and familiarity of expressions were defined operationally by the authors. In the present study, we instead determined the degree of novelty of figurative language by having it evaluated by college freshmen, like Oi and Tanaka [18] did in showing that the comprehension of ambiguous language tasks in children with HFASDs was highly correlated with the evaluation of the sentences in terms of conventionality by college freshmen. The correlation ( ) between children's mean literal-nonliteral preference magnitude (comprehension) and freshmen's mean strangeness rating (unconventionality) was −0.65 ( < 0.001) for children with HFASDs and −0.67 ( < 0.001) for TD children. ...
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