Introduction: Developing children’s skills in producing oral narratives can reflect their linguistic and cognitive abilities. However, to evaluate these abilities appropriately, it is necessary to find and apply an efficient narrative assessment tool. This study primarily aimed to assess the reliability and validity of a picture story, as a narrative eliciting tool, based on Persian-speaking children’s narratives. This assessment is going to be done at the microstructure and macrostructure levels. Furthermore, to evaluate the power of the assessment tool, we explored the effect of age and gender variables on using different narrative elements at the microstructure and macrostructure levels. Materials and Methods: We used a picture story, “Frog, where are you?” to elicit oral narratives in 48 subjects, including 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old boys and girls. The reliability and validity of the tool were respectively assessed by test-retest and factor analysis. Results: The findings indicated a significantly high correlation between the evaluated features based on test-retest. Besides, factor analysis revealed four categories: sentence structures, references, conjunctions, measures of story length. They were valid indicators for assessing Persian-speaking children’s narratives. The results also showed a statistically significant difference among different age groups, but an insignificant effect of gender on using discursive features in the tales.Conclusion: The picture story “Frog, where are you?” can be used as a reliable and valid narrative eliciting tool for Persian data at the microstructure and macrostructure levels. Also, the age factor, but not the gender one, affects the stories recited by Persian children.

The representation of the character reference in different statuses in the narrative is a multifaceted and complicated discourse task. Since Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is interrelated with social and communication deficits; particularly, children with ASD face more challenges with this task. The present study aimed to examine the introduction, reintroduction, and maintenance of the characters reference by using different linguistic devices in the narratives produced by Persian-speaking children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA). Materials and Methods: The narratives were elicited based on the picture story book "Frog, where are you?" Two groups of Persian-speaking children, aged 7, 9 and 11 years old, including high-functioning ASD (mean age: 9;5 y; mon) and a control group of Typically Developing (TD) ones (mean age: 9;1 y; mon), each group consisted of 24 subjects participated in this study. Then, the obtained data were analyzed by the Independent sample T Test and Nonparametric Mann-Whitney Test. Results: The results demonstrated the children with ASD represented referential expressions significantly different from their peer group with regard to using some linguistic devices, in the reference introduction, reintroduction and maintenance (P<0.05). In particular, the use of noun phrases was dominant for introducing the narrative characters in the two groups under study. However, complete ellipsis was significantly used more by ASD subjects for introducing "the boy" character. In addition, TD children used noun phrases, independent pronouns, dependent pronouns and complete ellipsis for the reintroduction of the referents in their narratives more than autistic children. Finally, for the maintenance of "the boy" reference, whereas autistic children used more noun phrases, TD children frequently used complete ellipsis and inflection of verbs. Conclusion: The choice of appropriate referential expressions for introduction, reintroduction and maintenance of the reference requires cognitive and linguistic skills, in which children with ASD showed deficits. Among these, reference reintroduction revealed the most challenging function for the children with ASD rather than TD children.

Background and Aim: Autism is a neuro-developmental disorder which can affect a person's cognitive and language skills. Since the human social life is highly dependent on cognitive and linguistic abilities, the use of these abilities is an important factor in the human growth and development. The production and perception of narrative discourse as one of the levels of language requires the use of cognitive and linguistic abilities. Considering the fact that the time line and the way it is expressed is one of the main components of narrative formation, the topic of time can be challenging in the narrative discourse for children with autism. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to investigate the representation of some features of time such as aspect including perfective and imperfective aspects and grounding including foreground and background in the narrative discourse of children with high-functioning autism. Materials and Methods: In the current research, the representation of aspect and grounding in narrative discourse of Persian-speaking children with high-functioning autism disorder (HFAD) and normal children was studied following Hickman and also Roberts, Barjasteh Delforooz and Jahani’s classifications. To this end, 20 male children with High-functioning autism disorder (chronological age of 7 to 11 years) and 20 normal male children (chronological age of 7 to 11 years) participated in this study and the narratives were elicited base on “Horse” and “Cat” picture stories given by Hickman. The collected data were first studied and described. Then, they were analysed by using Mann Whitney U test. Results: The findings showed that there was a significant difference between HFAD and normal children in the representation of perfective aspect and grounding (P=0.05). Indeed, children with HFAD had a weaker representation compared to the normal children. Similarly, the children with HFAD had a weaker performance in representing perfective aspect and foreground as the core data in producing narrative, even though, the children with HFAD produced more marginal data and background compared to the normal children. Conclusion: According to the results, it seems that poor performance by the children with HFAD in comparison with normal children in the representation of some features of time like aspect and grounding in narrative discourse can be related to their cognitive and linguistic weaknesses.