Content of Narratives of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine the content of narratives of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (5 to 7 years old, n=7 children) showing no delay in intellectual development and compare it with the utterances of the control group (10 children with typical development). The task asked the children to describe what kind of story was being told on four sheets of illustrations depicting 12 episodes. The obtained narratives were compared in terms of utterance volume, utterance content (action, state, mental state), causal connection, and story organization. The results showed that the amount of speech did not differ between the two groups. In narrative content structure, the two groups were similar in producing many utterances related to actions and few related to emotions. However, regarding the causal explanation of events, the narratives of children with ASD revealed difficulty in organizing the psychological story and the narrative so as to causally link the content related to emotions with other events. From this study, we concluded that ASD children who receive language treatment in early childhood characteristically demonstrate narrative issues in the latter half of early childhood compared to TD children of the same age. This suggests the importance, through early intervention from early childhood, of narrative development support focusing on causal relationships and narrative composition related to the emotions of the characters.