Semantic-Pragmatic Impairment in the Narratives of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Narrative impairments are common in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) battery includes a story-telling activity using a picture book called Tuesday. The current study aimed to identify differences between children with ASD and children with typical development (TD) on the production of Tuesday narratives, with a special focus on semantic-pragmatic aspects. Participants were 48 cognitively-able boys, in the age range of 4;10-7;0 years. Twenty-four participants were boys with ASD and 24 participants were TD boys. The semanticpragmatic analysis included measures of: story details (characters setting, objects, and actions), central ideas, evaluative comments, and unrelated text. Results showed that the narratives produced by children with ASD included fewer central ideas, and fewer settings, characters, and actions, but not objects, as compared with the narratives produced by their TD peers. The number of evaluative comments and utterances that were unrelated to the story did not differ between the groups. A negative correlation was found between the autism severity level and the number of central ideas and number of characters mentioned in the narratives of the ASD participants. Taken together, as a group, these findings point to a semantic-pragmatic impairment in ASD. However, individual analysis revealed heterogeneity within the ASD group in this area. Some of the results may be explained by cognitive deficits in maintaining central coherence (the Weak Central Coherence account). This study has important clinical implications. Defining the specific differentiating measures can maximize the use of the ADOS story-telling activity by clinicians. The association found between the autism severity level and some of the semantic measures can be used in evaluating the severity of the ASD symptoms.

Neural correlates of audiovisual narrative speech perception in children and adults on the autism spectrum: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…A recent review of electrophysiological studies of speech processing in ASD (Key & D'Ambrose Slaboch, 2021) suggests that abnormalities are more prominent with increasing stimulus and task complexity and the authors propose that most of the speech processing deficits observed are due to lack of social interest rather than impairments at basic auditory and speech processing levels. Support for this assertion comes from past research showing that individuals with ASD have difficulty with language processing at narrative levels (Coderre et al, 2018; Jolliffe & Baron‐Cohen, 2000; Kenan et al, 2019; Vermeulen, 2015). The story used in our study represents a complex naturalistic narrative with socially relevant content.…”

Specific Language Impairment, Autism Spectrum Disorders and Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorders: Is There Overlap in Language Deficits? A Review

“…Their speech is characterised by low levels of language abstraction, with few words related to feelings (Chojnicka & Wawer, 2020) and production of descriptive or action sequences (Westerveld & Roberts, 2017), with reduced references to semantic-pragmatic elements, as basic story details (e.g. characters, settings, actions) and complex concepts, reflected in the story's central ideas (Kenan et al, 2019). Later, in school age, the narratives of autistic children remain syntactically less complex, contain more ambiguous pronouns and include fewer story grammar elements than those of TD peers (Banney et al, 2015).…”

Autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits differ from non-autistic adults in social-pragmatic inferencing and narrative discourse

“…After watching each clip, the participants were asked to write in brief what they thought the scene was about and what had particularly captured their attention. These were used to formulate 'central ideas' (similar to the study by Kenan et al, 2019) to capture what was typically considered relevant for each scene. The sub-study participants were also provided with seven multiple-choices depicting pragmatic elements of each clip and asked to rate them from one to three to indicate which of the alternatives they thought described each video the best.…”