From Science Daily: 

Linguists and psychologists have debated how much the parts of the brain that mediate direct sensory experience are involved in understanding metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their landmark work ‘Metaphors we live by’, pointed out that our daily language is full of metaphors, some of which are so familiar (like “rough day”) that they may not seem especially novel or striking. They argued that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences.

New brain imaging research reveals that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a textural metaphor. The same region is not activated when a similar sentence expressing the meaning of the metaphor is heard.

Embodied cognition strikes again! I find this interesting, as it is commonly believed that individuals with autism and Asperger’s have difficulty processing metaphors. Could we trace this, too, back to a lack of effective connectivity between the senses? For those individuals who lack a rich and nuanced sensory database for the visual, auditory, and tactile senses associated with a label, such as “rough,” is it any wonder that the word might lack in rich and nuanced meaning?

Read the full article here.  

Edited to clarify, with apologies: it is certainly not my intention to over-generalize. In my experience, there are as many variations of autism as there are individuals who have the diagnosis. There, are, however, some patterns of differences that cause significant functional challenges, confusion, and frustration for the children I work with. This research sparked my interest and caused me to speculate about receptive processing of language and a possible connection to sensory integration because it would suggest an alternative to the typical rote method of teaching.