Individuals with High functioning autism (HFA) are distinguished by relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive skills. However, problems with pragmatic language skills have been consistently reported across the autistic spectrum, even when structural language is intact. Our main goal was to investigate how highly verbal individuals with autism process figurative language and whether manipulation of the stimuli presentation modality had an impact on the processing. We were interested in the extent to which visual context, e.g., an image corresponding either to the literal meaning or the figurative meaning of the expression may facilitate responses to such expressions. Participants with HFA and their typically developing peers (matched on intelligence and language level) completed a cross-modal sentence-picture matching task for figurative expressions and their target figurative meaning represented in images. We expected that the individuals with autism would have difficulties in)