Narratives of Personal Events in Children with Autism and Developmental Language Disorders

Background:

Narrative is a complex language activity involving cognitive and social skills. Talking about personal experiences poses unique challenges for verbal children with autism and may affect their self-awareness and the development of autobiographical memories. Children have a natural drive to share events and learn to construct narratives during joint linguistic interactions. They first learn to talk about scripted events like going to a restaurant or celebrating a birthday and are taught to follow a conventional format including core elements such as beginning, middle, and end. Preschool children move to personal narratives with the development of pragmatics and the understanding of people’s feelings.

Objectives:

The aim of this study is to examine the interactions of language and social deficits in autism through narratives of life events that ranged in emotional value and familiarity.

Methods:

Eight personal events were elicited among 3 groups of schoolage children: 14 high-functioning with Autism Spectrum Disorders (HFA), 12 non-autistic with developmental language disorders (DLD), and 12 typically developing (TD) matched for chronological age and non-verbal IQ. Narratives were transcribed and analyzed for (1) presence of conventional narrative elements and (2) narrative style (e.g., coherence).

Results:

The results showed that all children used conventional narrative elements. Compared to DLD and TD children, HFA children needed more prompting to recall emotional, unique or remote events. Overall, their stories included significantly less high-point and specific persons and tended to be less coherent and goal oriented.

Conclusions:

Narrative analysis of personal events provided an opportunity for identifying autism specific issues related to verbal communication and social impairments. The results represent a step towards understanding autobiographical memory in HFA children and the use of emotion as a cue during the recall of events.  The findings are interpreted in relation to the social role of narrative and shed light on novel remediation techniques.