Is this a normal question?

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I keep meaning to ask this question but I keep forgetting to lol...

I remember a few times psych doctors asking me a symbolic language question and if I know the meaning. For example one doctor asked me "what does you don't throw stones if you live in a glass house mean?" Now I know stuff like "greener on the other side of the fence" kinda stuff but that one stumped me!

Is that a normal question docs ask people or only if they suspect an ASD?

That's a normal question. Autistics may be non-plussed by it - although that largely depends on how verbal and well educated they are.

It means, if you are in a glass house and you criticize others (throw stones), you may find you hurt yourself more than the other person, because you are vulnerable to the same criticism.

They want to know if you know the meaning of "old sayings."

Frequently, younger people on the Spectrum have difficulty interpreting them. I used to have difficulty.

What if you have never heard of some old sayings before? I've never heard of the greenhouse one, so I would have failed that question. Nobody is born knowing sayings, which means even an NT would be clueless if they were asked a saying they don't know the meaning of.

That's the problem with some of these tests. They are tailored more for older people.

There's a test, for example, which shows a picture of a typewriter. I don't believe many people under 18 would know what a typewriter looks like.

Or a record player

Or a rotary/dial phone.

The reason you were asked the meaning of a saying, is that idioms is something people on the spectrum can have trouble with.

I've heard that it's not so unusual for younger people to not know their meaning anymore though, regardless of neurology.

Well, some of them are pretty self explanatory.

I've never understood the 'not getting idioms' part of ASD. Surely everyone has to learn the meaning of an idiom or do NT's just automatically know what they mean

I really didn't know very many idioms as a youngster...I wasn't really inspired to learn.

When I was researching ASD and found out about idioms , I was surprised at how many I didn't understand or had wrong.

I was once asked a similar question, not by a doctor but an education officer. This was during a generalised test to see if I qualified for extra time in my exams. It was during the general knowledge section of the test, I was also asked to define what a verb is and to tell the examiner what time the clock on the wall said. The question in my case was "What does it mean to let the cat out of the bag?"

Which is an expression that I'm familiar with. I sometimes find it interesting when I see questions such as "Does the expression getting under their skin make you uncomfortable?" the implication being "Do you take it literally, or read it as metaphorical?". However, I realise that it is metaphorical but it also makes me uncomfortable. Often, even when I know that something is being used as an expression, I still visually imagine it in the literal sense.

I got into a conversation with a friend recently, about how the questions people ask are often different from the ones they actually mean. After much debate, he stated that I didn't make much sense and how he disagreed. This was because I was telling him about a conversation I had with someone else, and when that person asked where I was from I told them about the area I currently live.

"But...you're not from there, you're from your hometown" he objected.

"That is true, but when she asked me where I was from what she truly meant was where do you currently reside?"

My logic being that if I'd simply answered with my hometown, she'd assume that I still live there. Which is incorrect. So it's easier to say where I currently live, then expand into where I used to live rather than the other way around. That's how I see it anyway.

That's the thing: "home town" can mean both where you were from originally, AND where you live now.

I first heard the aphorism "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" long ago, but nobody had to explain it to me. Among the difficulties are that even if one stepped outside for the throwing, there's no place to hide. There are, of course, myriads of exceptions - I might go for a walk, skip some stones across a lake, and then throw more to drive off some raccoons from my picnic, but it is best to go with the obvious stuff.

aphorisms, idioms, and metaphors are often used in assessments to test for language difficulties, which can indicate autism, or other disabilities.

Those kinds of questions were a part of the executive functioning tests that I took during my autism assessment. That section was called the "proverb test" and was divided into common and uncommon sayings. You don't have to know the exact meaning from experience (I didn't recognize half of the examples I was asked to explain), you just have to be able to draw reasonable conclusions. I scored in the 91st percentile.

Greater difficulty understanding figurative language can be a problem for some autistic people, but as others have pointed out, simply asking whether someone understands specific examples is very flawed, as there are all sorts of reasons that someone might not know them.

Unfortunately, "doesn't get idioms" seems to be conflated with other kinds of language difficulty which do seem more prevalent among autistic people. More common are difficulties with pragmatics - the way that we're supposed to read what people intend by "reading between the lines" to notice hints and value judgements that the strict meaning of the words alone doesn't convey. Lumping these together as "literal minded" language processing, such that if you have one kind of problem, you're expected to have the other, distorts the difficulties that a person really might have in everyday conversation and can lead to unrealistic expectations of what we're able to comprehend easily.

I've experienced this first hand when I've missed the meaning of some supposedly "obvious" hinting in what someone said - the allegation that I must be being disingenuous because I use figures of speech; but there's no reason to assume that those language skills are closely related.

well, some might need explanation, especially as they become less used, giving less context. There was an article some years ago about kids having more problems understanding idioms these days, as some are less used and less self explanatory in contemporary society.

But some are also self explanatory based on the saying or context.

For instance when I was about 10 and listened to my grandma gossiping about rels of my classmates, I was listening with almost waving ears. My grandmother suddenly said: "små gryter har også ører" (Little pitchers have big ears) and changed the subject.
I needed no explanation, I just understood immediately that I was the 'pitcher' listening.

an example of self explanatory without context:
"brent barn skyr ilden"
(literally burnt child avoids the fire; once bitten twice shy)