Narrative Ability in Children with Asperger's Syndrome

Background: Studies of English-speaking children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) have reported that narrative assessment is sensitive to the communication impairments. With respect to typical cognitive development, narrative cognition represents one of the most fundamental means by which we come to understand the world (Bruner, 1990). It would be important to examine whether and how children with ASD are sensitive to the macro-structural story grammar components of an event (introduction, relationship, initiating events, internal response, attempts/actions, and ending) (Strong, 1998) in telling a story.  Narrative development of Korean children with ASD has rarely been examined, and it is unclear how qualitatively different their deficits may be from typically developing Korean children’s narrative ability.  Objectives: The purpose of this study was to provide an analysis of narratives in 10 children with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) and 10 typically developing (TD) children matched on age, gender, language abilities, and cognitive abilities.  Methods: Participants in this study were 10 children with AS (nine boys and 1 girl) aged with a range of 5;10-7;5 and 10 TD children (4 boys and 6 girls) aged with a range of 4;6-7;11). Both groups completed stories based on the MacArthur Story Stem Battery.   Each of their stories was assessed in terms of story organization components developed in Strong Narrative Assessment Procedure (Strong, 1998). Results: Narratives were scored quantitatively and analyzed qualitatively for mentions of macro-structural story grammar elements.  We found that the AS group had significantly poorer performance than the TD group on the overall story grammar score, and that the AS groups had lower attempts/actions and ending scores than the TD group.  It was also found that the AS group had significantly more difficulties than the TD group in developing a story in cases involving a complicated relationship shared by more than two characters in an event. Conclusions: We conclude that the presence of ASD has a significantly detrimental effect on narrative skills to integrate utterances coherently into the macro-structure of a story.  It is speculated that lack of sensitivity to the macro-structural elements is likely to be associated with a deficiency in employing theory of mind and perspective-switch as needed in narration.