Narrative production in autistic adults: A systematic analysis of the microstructure, macrostructure and internal state language

Abstract

While narrative competence has been well documented in autistic children and young adolescents, fairly little is known about narrative performance of autistic adults. However, narrative abilities continue to develop well into adulthood. Hence, the main objective of the present study is to provide a clearer linguistic and communicative profile of ASD in adulthood by performing a systematic description of narrative performance in autistic adults. A specific annotation scheme was developed to code narrative production, in order to be able to compare the production of autistic participants to pairwise matched neurotypical adults relative to microstructure (syntactic complexity), macrostructure (overall story structure and cohesive ties) and internal state language of the corpus' narratives. The results suggest that autistic adults performed worse than their neurotypical peers on all three dimensions of narrative production, resulting in less coherent narratives overall for autistic adults.

How do autistic adults use syntactic and prosodic cues to manage spoken discourse?

“…Likewise, regarding types of dependency clauses, a different pattern emerged. Specifically, in Geelhand et al (2020), autistic participants produced less verbal but more averbal dependency clauses than their typical peers while elliptic dependency clauses did not differ across groups. In the present study, there were no group differences in verbal dependency clauses but one in elliptic dependency clauses, with neurotypical participants producing more than autistic participants.…”

“…Before delving deeper into the results of the BDUs, it is important to note an interesting difference in the results of the syntactic segmentation of this study and that of Geelhand et al (2020), who used the same segmentation procedure. In the latter study, autistic participants were less productive then their neurotypical peers: they produced fewer words, syntactic sequences and syntactic units overall.…”

“…Considering the exploratory nature of the study, on the one hand, and the elaborate segmentation procedure on the other hand, a small portion of the initial participant sample (Geelhand et al, 2020), viz. 12 participants was processed.…”

“…Finegrained analyses unveil specific linguistic differences between the verbal productions by autistic and NT individuals, often leading to the conclusion that the discourse of the former is less coherent (for reviews see Baixauli et al, 2016;Stirling et al, 2014). In a more recent study, Geelhand et al (2020) performed a systematic analysis of the linguistic features usually associated with three central dimensions of narrative discourse (a widely studied discourse genre in ASD) -microstructure (syntactic complexity), macrostructure (overall story structure and cohesive ties) and internal state language -in pairwise matched groups of ASD and NT adults. While autistic adults did not lack the ability to create a story, they still performed worse than their NT peers on all three narrative dimensions.…”

“…This type of BDU is assigned an unmarked strategy, with information presented in a straightforward and rather neutral way (Degand & Simon, 2009a). Types of BDUs are illustrated by examples from the ACTE Spoken Corpus (Geelhand et al, 2020), which involves semi-structured conversations between an experimenter and an autistic or neurotypical participant. Square brackets indicate the boundaries of a syntactic units and the three slashes represent silent boundary.…”