ABSTRACT
Research on autistic children’s language frequently notes that many children think concretely and have difficulty understanding abstract concepts.1 Autistic children tend to take literally metaphoric language that draws on concrete images: parents relay stories of a child smashing his head into a screen door when told “Put your head in the door and call dad” or asking “Can I have an Oreo?” on hearing someone say “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.” Figurative language like metaphor or its less-well-known cousin, metonymy-which is the focus of this chapter-can be especially confusing for an autistic person because it seems to be about concrete things (cookies), but actually refers to an abstract concept (how some situation has turned out). Autistic language users, this chapter suggests, think metonymically, connecting and ordering concepts according to seemingly chance and arbitrary occurrences in an “autistic idiolect.”
