Semantic Conflict

Semantic conflict is a type of cognitive interference that may be harder to resolve in the ADHD/autistic brain – discerning the difference in meaning of information exchanged between two or more systems. For example, semantic conflict in ADHD orautism: 

• ADHD: A study found adults with ADHD were less efficient than controls at resolving semantic conflicts between literal and metaphorical meanings in sentence pairs. For children, the most common language problems are expressive, receptive, and pragmatic.
• Children with autism don’t use semantic context to interpret ambiguous sentence or word meaning, or infer how to pronounce homographs (same form, different meaning), like entrance meaning a way into a room orto hypnotize. Also difficult is conveying story narratives, using pronouns correctly, adding irrelevant information, language processing speed, integration with cognition.