Narrative Analysis in Adolescents With Fragile X Syndrome

Abstract

This study analyzed narratives of male and female adolescents with fragile X syndrome (FXS). The impact of structural language, cognition and autism symptomatology on narrative skills and the association between narratives and literacy were examined. Narratives from 32 adolescents with FXS (24 males, 8 females) were analyzed for macrostructure. Relationships between narrative macrostructure, language scores, cognitive scores, Childhood Autism Rating Scale-Second Edition scores and literacy skills were examined. Males produced more simplistic narratives, whereas the females' narratives were more complex. Language scores predicted narrative scores above and beyond nonverbal cognitive skills and autism symptomatology. Narrative scores correlated with literacy scores. Narrative skills in FXS are predicted by language skills and are correlated with literacy skills. Investigation into narrative interventions in FXS is needed.

How to Assess Oral Narrative Skills of Children and Adolescents with Intellectual Disabilities: A Systematic Review

“…The final criterion applied was the inclusion of participants with ID (third filter). A total of 22 studies were selected for data extraction [2,6,7,22,28,29,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48].…”

“…Regarding the geographic location of the selected studies and the language of the participants, most of the studies had English-speaking participants (n = 14), mainly in the United States [2,6,29,34,[36][37][38][39][40][41], but also in Canada [42], the United Kingdom [7,43], and New Zealand [44]. Four of the studies had Italian-speaking participants and were conducted in Italy [22,35,45,46].…”

“…In contrast, those studies that did not incorporate TD participants (n = 11) were more focused on a specific age range (e.g., [6,37,42]). Regarding the etiology of ID, in general, the studies included participants with Down syndrome (DS) (n = 13) [6,22,29,33,34,[36][37][38][39][41][42][43][44], Williams syndrome (WS) (n = 6) [28,35,40,45,47,48], fragile X syndrome (FXS) (n = 6) [2,6,29,34,36,39], autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (n = 3) [33,34,39], and to a lesser extent, other diagnoses such as cerebral palsy (n = 1) [33], global development delay (GDD) (n = 1) [33], and Alexander disease (n = 1) [46] were included. Individuals with nonsyndromic ID were included in two studies [6,7].…”

“…Oral narrative skill is the ability to produce and share a chronologically sequenced account of an event or story [1]. It involves both the overall organization and the inclusion of essential details (macrostructure) as well as the specific linguistic elements used within the story (microstructure) [2,3]. Thus, the act of producing narratives is both cognitively and linguistically demanding [4,5].…”

Communication in fragile X syndrome: Patterns and implications for assessment and intervention

“…As in other areas, females with FXS frequently demonstrate less severe pragmatic impairment than males, although there is considerable variability (Abbeduto et al, 2008;Thurman et al, 2017a;Martin et al, 2020;Neal et al, 2022). Girls show deficits in signaling of non-comprehension as compared to TD peers matched on cognition, and there has been some research showing decreased responsivity in girls with FXS as they reach adolescence when asked to repair a communication breakdown (Thurman et al, 2017a;Martin et al, 2020).…”