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Description
With each passing year, the number of children diagnosed with high functioning autism (HFA) increases. While numerous studies have documented the types and severity of linguistic and social delays in toddlers and preschoolers with HFA, limited research has been done to determine how their linguistic and social profiles change over time. As the production of narratives requires linguistic, social, and cognitive contributions, narratives are useful tools for obtaining a multi-faceted profile of children with HFA. To extend our understanding of spoken discourse in this population, the present study will examine narratives across two discourse contexts: a personal narrative elicitation task and a semistructured conversational task. The goals of the study are: (1) to compare performance of HFA and typically-developing (TD) school-age children on personal narratives in a narrative elicitation task; (2) to determine whether school-age children with HFA produce narratives in a semi-structured conversational task similarly to TD children; and (3) to compare the quality of narratives in structured tasks to those in produced in conversation. Twelve individuals with high functioning autism, ages 8.0-12.0, and 25 typically-developing children with ages evenly distributed from eight to twelve were administered the aforementioned narrative measures. The transcripts were transcribed and coded by trained undergraduate and graduate students. School-age children performed comparably to TD peers on measures of complex syntax and evaluation, but produced more morphological errors and fewer narrative components. They produced a comparable proportion of narratives with similar topics, compared to the control group, during conversation. Deficits in executive functioning and organization of memory are discussed as explanations for these results. These results suggest that narrative tasks may provide useful information when assessing school-age children with HFA.
