Metonymy is a type of nonliteral language in which the the nonliteralness is focused on a single word.

For example, if you read "He fought in Vietnam" – you read it as the same speed as you would read "He travelled to Vietnam" because we understand Vietnam as the war as well as the place. But, if you read 'He fought in Finland', you are slower – because you recognise Finland as only the place.

Using this phenomenon we gave people different metonymy sentences to read self-placed (i.e. by advancing the sentence using the space bar) and we measured how their level of autistic traits were associated with how quickly they read metonymic sentences.