Defining the Characteristics of Story Production of Autistic Children: A Multilevel Analysis.
Ines Adornetti, Alessandra Chiera, Daniela Altavilla and 6 others
PMID 37653117WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic children told picture stories with more sound and word errors, fewer picture events and events not shown, and less connected overall than matched peers, even though groups scored similarly on memory, attention and theory-of-mind tasks.
Key findings
01Autistic children produced stories with more sound errors and more word errors where a related word was used instead.
02Autistic children included fewer events shown in the pictures, fewer events that had to be worked out, and more whole-story coherence errors.
03The two groups did not differ on non-word repetition, working memory, attention or theory-of-mind scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was exploratory and examined many story measures at once, so individual findings need replication. The non-word repetition task did not provide a reliable assessment of language competence, so narrative differences may reflect unmeasured language differences. No comprehensive language test was administered, such as sentence completion or lexical naming. The theory-of-mind task measured only the affective component, not the cognitive component such as false belief. The picture story had only one event open to mental-state interpretation, so it may not be a good test of internal state terms. The sample was Italian-speaking children with IQ scores in the normative range, so results may not apply to other languages, cultures or children with lower cognitive or language levels. The picture-card task encouraged a linear story order, which may not match narrative styles in all cultures.
Declared interests
The supplied text names Università degli Studi Roma Tre as the funder and reports no other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the story differences as proof that autistic children have a narrative-specific problem after language was controlled. The groups had similar non-word repetition scores, but the authors state that this task did not provide a reliable assessment of language competence.