Beyond Sentences: Using the Expression, Reception, and Recall of Narratives Instrument to Assess Communication in School-Aged Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Results suggest that the ERRNI reveals discourse impairments that may not be identified by measures that focus on individual words and sentences. Overall, the ERRNI provides a useful measure of communicative skill beyond the sentence level in school-aged children with ASD.

Toward a Definition of the Linguistic Profile of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Indeed, 67% and 65% of them produced a significant amount of local and global coherence errors (see also Kuijper et al, 2017) that likely contributed to the reduction of their levels of lexical informativeness. Indeed, their narratives were characterized by the inclusion of repetitive and overtly incoherent utterances that were quite often not correctly linked with each other (e.g., Diehl et al, 2006;Baixauli et al, 2016;Volden et al, 2017). Of note, they also produced fewer ideas that were portrayed in the vignettes as reflected by the reduced % of Thematic Selection.…”

“…Traditional tests cannot adequately describe the linguistic profile of children with communicative disorders (e.g., Marini et al, 2008;Volden et al, 2017). To capture the interactions between different linguistic skills, it is necessary to include also procedures of narrative discourse assessments (Marini et al, 2005(Marini et al, , 2014.…”

“…Indeed, the generation of an informative message requires the speaker to consider the context and tie the different propositions through cohesive and coherent links. Therefore, a comprehensive assessment cannot be limited to the analysis of the microlinguistic features of message production but must include also the macrolinguistic ones (Volden et al, 2017). Overall, the narrative language produced by children with ASD has been described as idiosyncratic at both microand macrolinguistic levels of processing (e.g., Baixauli et al, 2016).…”

“…As to this regard, a recent investigation by Malkin et al (2018) showed that, even if they can take to some extent the interlocutor-specific prior experience into account, children with ASD may lag behind typical peers in the degree to which they make use of such information. Difficulties have been reported in the ability to establish causal connections between the utterances (e.g., Diehl et al, 2006;Baixauli et al, 2016;Volden et al, 2017) and organize the temporal dynamics of narrative discourse (Ferretti et al, 2018;Marini et al, 2019) to the extent that they are often not able to adequately use story-grammar information to organize their narrative speech samples (Goldman, 2008;McCabe et al, 2013).…”

Development of a Digital Content-Free Speech Analysis Tool for the Measurement of Mental Health and Follow-Up for Mental Disorders: Protocol for a Case-Control Study

“…As a result, there has been intensive development in the automation of such analyses, with continuing positive results [ 14 ]. However, so far dissemination of such analyses, such as in the early detection, diagnosis, or assessment of mental disorders, has not occurred in broad clinical practice but has been described in a few single cases [ 15 , 16 ]. The reasons for this may be complex, but it may be due to the high technical effort required to perform these analyses that have led to them not being well reflected in outpatient care practice [ 17 ].…”