The current study examines narratives elicited using a wordless picture book, focusing on language used to describe the characters’ thoughts and emotions (i.e., internal state language, ISL). The sample includes 21 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and 24 typically developing controls, matched on children's gender, IQ, as well as receptive and expressive vocabulary. This research had three major findings. First, despite equivalent performance on standardized language assessments, the volume of children's narratives (i.e., the number of utterances and words, the range of unique verbs and adjectives) was lower in children with ASD than in typically developing controls. Second, after controlling for narrative volume, the narratives of children with ASD were less likely to reference the characters’ emotions than was the case for typically developing controls. Finally, our results revealed a specific association between children's use of emotion terms and their performance on a battery of experimental tasks evaluating children's Theory of Mind abilities. Implications for our understanding of narrative deficits in ASD as well as interventions that use narrative as a context for improving social comprehension are discussed.

We examined visual attention allocation during a set of social videos that are intended to elicit the coordination of attention with another person, compared to a control condition. Deficits in joint attention are a characteristic of young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Participants included a diverse sample of 50 typically developing school-aged children between 3 and 9 years of age (M = 6:3, SD = 1:8). Results demonstrated that gaze allocation differed significantly between the experimental and control condition. Further, individual differences in gaze allocation were significantly predicted by a parent-report measure evaluating features of the broad autism phenotype. This study contributes to a research program that aims to develop and validate an endophenotype measure of ASD.