An investigation into the comprehension of indirect meaning in typically developed and autism spectrum disorder populations.

语言对于交流思想和想法，维护关系以及发展我们的社会和文化世界至关重要。虽然语言理解是我们许多人认为理所当然的能力，但自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者在社交语言和语用理解方面存在困难。本项目旨在阐明社交语言（特别是PI）理解的基础机制以及ASD如何影响社交语言理解（预计将发表3篇高质量论文）。该项目将利用眼动追踪提供一种在线测量方法，这将首次使我们能够确定在理解过程中（早期或晚期），被诊断为ASD的个体对模拟话语中的间接含义敏感。

Language is vital for communicating thoughts and ideas, maintaining relationships, and developing our social and cultural world. Although language comprehension is an ability that many of us take for granted, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties in social language and pragmatic comprehension.This project aims to elucidate the mechanisms underpinning comprehension of social language (particularly PI) and how this is affected by ASD (3 high quality publications are anticipated). The project will utilise eye-tracking to provide an online measure which, for the first time, will allow us to determine at what point during comprehension (early or late) individuals with a diagnosis of ASD are sensitive to indirect meaning in simulated discourse.