Narrative production in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Similarities and differences.

Abstract

The present study focuses on the similarities and differences in language production between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In addition, we investigated whether Theory of Mind (ToM), working memory, and response inhibition are associated with language production. Narratives, produced by 106 Dutch-speaking children (36 with ASD, 34 with ADHD, and 36 typically developing) aged 6 to 12 during ADOS assessment, were examined on several linguistic measures: verbal productivity, speech fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical semantics, and discourse pragmatics. Children were tested on ToM, working memory, and response inhibition and parents filled in the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC-2). Gold-standard diagnostic measures (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schema [ADOS], Autism Diagnostic Interview Revised [ADI-R], and the Parent Interview for Child Symptoms [PICS]) were administered to all children to confirm diagnosis. Regarding similarities, both clinical groups showed impairments in narrative performance relative to typically developing children. These were confirmed by the CCC-2. These impairments were not only present on pragmatic measures, such as the inability to produce a narrative in a coherent and cohesive way, but also on syntactic complexity and their production of repetitions. As for differences, children with ADHD but not children with ASD showed problems in their choice of referring expressions and speech fluency. ToM and working memory performance but not response inhibition were associated with many narrative skills, suggesting that these cognitive mechanisms explain some of the impairments in language production. We conclude that children with ASD and children with ADHD manifest multiple and diverse language production problems, which may partly relate to their problems in ToM and working memory. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Witness-Aimed First Account (WAFA): A new technique for interviewing autistic witnesses and victims

“…In contrast to our initial predictions, both the autistic and TD groups' overall recall was similarly negatively impacted when the event's narrative structure was lost, indicating a lack of group differences at the encoding stage. While there is robust evidence that the comprehension and production of narratives can be difficult for autistic individuals (e.g., Boucher, 1981;Diehl et al, 2006;Hilvert, et al, 2016;Kuijper, Hartman, Bogaerds-Hazenberg, & Hendriks, 2017;Lee et al, 2018;Losh & Capps, 2003;Loveland et al, 1990;McCabe et al, 2013), there is also some limited evidence suggesting that autistic individuals can sometimes utilise narratives to enhance their encoding and subsequent retrieval. For example, in contrast to previous findings of no enhancement of emotionally arousing content on recall of static stimuli such as words , sentences (Beversdorf et al, 1998) and images in ASD (Deruelle, Hubert, Santos, & Wicker, 2008), over two experiments Maras et al (2012) found that emotionally arousing stories were remembered better (and forgotten less) than neutral events by both autistic and TD participants.…”

“…Beyond experimental memory paradigms, most autistic people also experience some degree of difficulty in their ability to construct and relate a coherent narrative (Tager-Flusberg, Paul, & Lord, 2005). While generally not differing from language-matched TD individuals on basic aspects of narrative, such as the identification of the main elements of an event (Beaumont & Newcombe, 2006;Capps, Losh, & Thurber, 2000;Hilvert, Davidson, & Gámez, 2016;Hogan-Brown, Losh, Martin, & Mueffelmann, 2013;Losh & Capps, 2003;Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1995), autistic individuals' narratives often lack causation and coherence, particularly with regards to temporality and the causal connection of plot points (e.g., Capps et al, 2000;Diehl, Bennetto, & Young, 2006;Hilvert et al, 2016;King, Dockrell, & Stuart, 2014;Kuijper, Hartman, Bogaerds-Hazenberg, & Hendriks, 2017;Lee et al, 2018;Losh & Capps, 2003;Losh & Gordon, 2014;McCabe, Hillier, & Shapiro, 2013;Tager-Flusberg, 2000). It has been suggested that these narrative difficulties may be explained in part by difficulties in considering the needs and perspectives of the listener (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 1988;Colle, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & van der Lely, 2008;Bruner & Feldman, 1993;Goldman, 2008;Hilvert et al, 2016;Tager-Flusberg, 1995;Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1995) as well as in generating, strategically planning and organizing one's recall of an event (Barnes & Baron-Cohen, 2012).…”

The Relationship between Executive Functions and Language Production in 5–6-Year-Old Children: Insights from Working Memory and Storytelling

“…In sum, research on the relationship between working memory and story creating in preschoolers is sparse, and the results of existing studies are not conclusive due, mainly, to differences in tasks used to elicit narration (retelling, composing a story based on one or a series of pictures) and in populations (atypically developing children and matched on different factors peers [38,41,42]), which limits the generalizability of the results to typically developing children (without language delays). Finally, in the majority of the above-mentioned studies, the two components (visual and verbal) of working memory were analyzed conjunctly, which does not allow to evaluate their respective contribution to the development of spontaneous language production.…”

“…Although there is a growing body of research on the relationship between working memory and language development, only a few studies thus far have examined the relationship between working memory and children's ability to produce a spontaneous monologue speech, as, for example, when children compose a story (a narrative) [35], or retell it [36]. Among these studies, the overwhelming majority examined this relationship in atypically developing populations or in a comparative paradigm (e.g., atypically vs. typically developing children) [33,[37][38][39][40][41][42]. For example, Dodwell and Bavin [38] reported a significant relationship between various working memory tasks and children's capacity to retell and to create a story (based on pictures).…”

Colors of Autism Spectrum: A Single Paradigm Explains the Heterogeneity in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…ADHD and ASD deviate in terms of narrative production in children; children with ASD performing worse on narrative production, whereas children with ADHD perform better than typically developing (TD) children in terms of their mean Z-scores for emotional and cognitive terms in lexical semantics. In contrast, children with ASD and ADHD are similar in some ways; e.g., in measures of mean length of utterance, they both perform poorly compared with TD children (Kuijper et al, 2017).…”