Narrative story telling in autism and Down's syndrome

Abstract

The present study investigated the ability of high functioning verbal children and adolescents with autism or Down's syndrome to tell a story to a listener. Sixteen subjects with autism and 16 with Down's syndrome (DS), matched on verbal mental age, watched a short puppet show or video sketch and were then asked to tell the story to a listener and answer follow-up questions. The majority of both groups were able to produce recognizable, though primitive, narratives. The groups did not differ in general story characteristics and both groups exhibited errors in language use. Subjects with autism had a greater tendency to produce bizarre language and adopt an 'externalized' point of view in which the puppets/actors were seen as objects rather than characters. Also, DS subjects produced significantly more communicative gestures. Although the groups were about equally able to supply information for follow-up questions, autistic subjects produced a higher proportion of bizarre responses. Results indicate that the story recall ability of autistic subjects resembles that of language-matched, mentally retarded persons. However, some autistic subjects appeared to have difficulty grasping the story as a representation of meaningful events. Results are discussed in relation to the autistic person's awareness of listeners' needs and aspects of the social environment.

Story Goodness in Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and in Optimal Outcomes From ASD

“…Studies comparing children with ASD and those with typical development (TD), with groups matched on language and cognitive abilities, report minimal quantitative differences in narrative length and syntactic complexity but deficits in organization and cohesiveness (Diehl et al, 2006;Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1995). Narratives in ASD tend to lack coherent global organization (Baron- Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1986;Loveland, McEvoy, Tunali, & Kelley, 1990;Suh et al, 2014), with fewer causal connections between story events (cohesion) and reduced communication of story "gist" (Diehl et al, 2006).…”

A psychological approach to understanding the social and language impairments in autism

“…Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith (1986) were the first to show that, compared to control subjects, children with autism provided fewer mental state terms in their narratives for a sequence of pictures depicting a simple false belief scenario. In a more detailed study, Loveland and her colleagues asked their subjects to retell a story presented in the form of a puppet show or video sketch (Loveland, McEvoy, Tunali, & Kelley, 1990). The children with autism were less able than controls to consider their listener's needs and produced more bizarre or inappropriate utterances.…”

Detecting linguistic idiosyncratic interests in autism using distributional semantic models

“…Expert manual analysis of conversations and narratives of individuals with ASD has shown that children and teenagers with autism include significantly more bizarre and irrelevant content in their narratives (Loveland et al, 1990;Losh and Capps, 2003) and introduce more abrupt topic changes in their conversations (Lam et al, 2012) than their typically developing peers. Automatic detection of poor topic maintenance has also been explored using techniques originally developed for information extraction (Rouhizadeh et al, 2013).…”