‘Once upon a ribbit’: Stories narrated by autistic children

Abstract

Ten autistic, 10 mentally retarded and 10 normal children, matched on verbal mental age, were asked to narrate a story from a wordless picture book. The narratives were coded on a range of measures tapping the following characteristics: story length and complexity, story structure, referential devices, and affective and social‐cognitive narrative enrichment devices. The main findings were that, compared to both control groups, the autistic children produced significantly shorter stories and were less likely to include any causal statements to explain the relationship between events in the stories. For the autistic children, the use of a story schema, referential devices that took account of their listener's needs, and the frequency of enrichment devices were all significantly correlated, suggesting that they reflect the same underlying knowledge. These findings are discussed in relation to the theory of mind hypothesis of autism.

A psychological approach to understanding the social and language impairments in autism

“…Some of the children with autism were unable to even understand the story as a representation of meaningful events, suggesting that they lacked a cultural perspective underlying narrative (Bruner & Feldman, 1993;Loveland & Tunali, 1993). Tager-Flusberg (1995) also found that children with autism told impoverished stories in response to a wordless picture book. Furthermore, none of the children with autism in this study provided any causal explanations for the events in the stories.…”

Entrenamiento en habilidades sociocomunicativas en los trastornos del espectro autista de alto funcionamiento

“…Así, una auto-reestructuración implica la capacidad de detectar la ambigüe-dad del mensaje, y consecuentemente poner en práctica estrategias lingüísticas que procuren resolverla. Algunos autores (p.ej., Capps, Losh y Thurber, 2000;Tager-Flusberg, 1995) resaltan las dificultades con los elementos evaluativos en la población con autismo. Estas dificultades también las observamos en nuestro estudio al no encontrar diferencias significativas al comparar los resultados en los tres momentos de la evaluación (análisis intragrupo).…”

Examination of script and non-script based narrative retellings in children with autism spectrum disorders

“…As discussed in Stirling et al (2014), if the child is asked to tell the story to the same experimenter who read them the story, they may be less likely to incorporate some aspects of narrative due to the belief that the listener already knows the information (Capps et al, 2000;Tager-Flusberg, 1995;Thurber & Tager-Flusberg, 1993), thus reducing the well-formedness of the narrative.…”