What's the story? A computational analysis of narrative competence in autism.
Michelle Lee, Gary E Martin, Abigail Hogan and 3 others
PMID 28095705WHAT IT FOUND
People with autism told stories from emotional pictures that were less like the typical group's stories, used fewer complex sentences, and gave fewer reasons for characters' feelings, but still included basic story elements.
Key findings
01The autism group's stories were less similar to a standard story from the control group than controls' stories were, especially on scene 1 and scene 5.
02The autism group used fewer complex syntax devices and fewer evaluative devices than controls, with adjusted mean differences of 2.74 and 2.22.
03Within the autism group, lower semantic similarity was associated with fewer story clauses, less complex syntax, fewer evaluative devices, and more prompts.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small, with 19 autism participants and 14 controls, and the authors call the results preliminary because they did not correct for multiple comparisons. The groups differed in age, sex, and IQ, although the authors examined these factors and reported they did not change the findings. Control participants were largely recruited from a university community, so they may not represent the general population. Hand-coding agreement was .68 on average, and utterance segmentation agreement was 79% on average. LSA does not model word order, so it cannot capture problems caused by word sequence. The study did not test whether LSA can be used in clinical assessment or measure treatment response.
Declared interests
The article is listed as supported by NIH extramural research. The authors declared no financial or other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat LSA as a ready clinical test. The study used a small sample, did not test LSA for clinical assessment or treatment response, and the authors call the results preliminary.