Compared to Neurotypical Matched Controls, Kids with ASD Struggle with Phonological and Lexical Errors
A recent Italian study has examined the storytelling skills of children with autism and compared those skills to neurotypical children. Participants in this research included 41 children with autism and 41 typically developing children between the ages of 7 and 11 years. Study subjects were matched on age, gender, level of formal education, intelligence quotient (IQ), working memory, attention skills, theory of mind, and phonological short-term memory. The study’s design involved both groups of children being shown a cartoon story made of six drawings presented on the same page (the “Nest Story” originally by Paradis, 1987). Each child was later asked to tell the story of the drawing to the experimenter. After analyzing the stories from both groups, the authors discovered that children on the spectrum produced stories with higher percentages of phonological and lexical errors than the narratives produced by the neurotypical control group. Additionally, they found that children with autism included fewer visible events and inferred events, and their stories were less coherently organized than the narratives of the control group. The authors state that from a clinical point of view, their study proves the efficacy of using procedures of narrative discourse assessment to appropriately identify the linguistic and narrative challenges of children on the spectrum. They suggest this recognition could lead to the development of narrative treatments aimed at improving specific aspects of story production.
