Narrative ability in high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

This study examined differences of language skills in forms and pragmatics between children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically developing children. The participants included 10 children (5-7-year-olds, average IQ: 90.3) with ASD, and 10 normally developing children (5-6-year-olds). We used twelve sets of four-sequential pictures. There were four different stories for each condition: mechanical story, behavioral story, and intentional story. The children were asked to verbally describe the story in front of them for each set. We collected narrations of the same stories from 10 adults without disabilities to make the basic story lines, and set four categories: standard unit, related unit, comment unit, and unrelated unit. The results suggested that there was no significant difference in total volume of narration, mean length of utterance (MLU), or vocabulary (token and term types), but the total number of errors in using particles appeared more in the ASDs. In the pragmatic aspect, the ASD subjects narrated fewer standard stories, and tended to narrate more unrelated than standard stories. Overall, the results showed ASDs acquired words as much as normally developing children, but tended to have problems in acquiring skills of syntactic construction and pragmatics. We concluded that it is necessary to focus on syntactic construction as before, but also to address pragmatic skills and encourage ASDs to narrate so as to be easily understood by others.