Narrative discourse in adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome

Episodic memory impairment and its influencing factors in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: systematic review and meta-analysis

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are considered to experience difficulties with episodic memory (EM), while studies on EM in ASD have shown inconsistent results. A meta-analysis of 65 episodic memory studies with a combined sample size of 1652 individuals with ASD and 1626 typically developing individuals was conducted to analyze factors that may affect EM in ASD. The results showed that ASD had a significant medium to large effect size decrease in EM ability. Age period, task type, and reporting method significantly reduced the observed heterogeneity while EM type did not reduce the observed heterogeneity. The results of the meta-regression revealed that it was verbal IQ rather than full-scale IQ that was significantly correlated with EM in individuals with ASD. These findings suggest that individuals with ASD have reduced EM abilities and the potential factors is still needed to be explored.

The effect of reappraisal on the emotional regulation of shame in young adults with ASD and typical peers

Young adults with ASD experience shame in social interactions, and if poorly mishandled, it may interfere with their attempts to participate in their social environment. One strategy to reduce shame is cognitive reappraisal, yet the efficacy of this strategy was not examined in ASD. Here, we investigated the effect of reappraisal in reducing feelings of shame in ASD and the thematic contents used. Young adults with high-functioning ASD and typical participants were shown shame-arousing pictures. They imagined themselves as the primary character in each scenario and rated their feelings of shame. Then, they were trained to reappraise shame-arousing pictures less negatively. Finally, they viewed other shame-arousing photos, reappraised them, stated aloud their new interpretations, and rated their feelings. We found lower shame ratings in participants with ASD than in typical participants. In addition, we found a similar reduction in shame ratings after reappraising these pictures in both groups. Qualitative analysis revealed that participants with ASD used fewer positive narratives and more neutral and unrealistic descriptions than their typical peers. These findings highlight shame-regulation abilities in individuals with ASD while pointing to their unique narratives. We recommend that clinical interventions in ASD emphasize generating positive reappraisals of social situations.

Narrative Ability in Autism and First-Degree Relatives

Narrative is an important communication skill for sharing personal experiences and connecting with others. Narrative skills are often impacted in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and have important consequences for social interactions and relationships. Subtle differences in narrative have also been reported among first-degree relatives of autistic individuals, suggesting that narrative may also be an etiologically important language-related skill that is influenced by genes associated with ASD. This study examined narrative ability and related visual attention during narration in ASD and first-degree relatives of individuals with ASD (siblings and parents) to understand how narrative and related attentional styles may be variably impacted across the spectrum of ASD genetic influence. Participants included 56 autistic individuals, 42 siblings of autistic individuals, 49 controls, 161 parents of autistic individuals, and 61 parent controls. Narratives were elicited using a wordless picture book presented on an eye tracker to record concurrent gaze. Findings revealed parallel patterns of narrative differences among ASD and sibling groups in the use of causal language to connect story elements and the use of cognitive and affective language. More subtle differences within the domain of causal language were evident in ASD parents. Parallel patterns in the ASD and sibling groups were also found for gaze during narration. Findings implicate causal language as a critical narrative skill that is impacted in ASD and may be reflective of ASD genetic influence in relatives. Gaze patterns during narration suggest similar attentional mechanisms associated with narrative among ASD families.

A matter of precision? Scene imagery in individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder

The ability to create mental representations of scenes is essential for remembering, predicting, and imagining. In individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) this ability may be impaired. Considering that autistic characteristics such as weak central coherence or reduced communication abilities may disadvantage autistic participants in traditional imagery tasks, this study attempted to use a novel task design to measure the ability of scene imagery. Thirty high-functioning adults with ASD and 27 non-autistic matched control adults were asked to describe imagined fictitious scenes using two types of scene imagery tasks. In a free imagery task, participants were asked to imagine a scene based on a given keyword. In a guided imagery task, participants had to imagine a scene based on a detailed description of the scene. Additionally, narrative abilities were assessed using the Narrative Scoring Scheme. Statistical analyses revealed no group effects in the free and guided imagery of fictional scenes. Participants with ASD performed worse than control participants in the narrative task. Narrative abilities correlated positively with performance in both imagery tasks in the ASD group only. Hence, individuals with ASD seem to show as good imagery abilities as non-autistic individuals. The results are discussed in the light of the differences between imagery and imagination and possible gender differences.

Normal but Different: Autistic Adolescents Who Score Within Normal Ranges on Standardized Language Tests Produce Frequent Linguistic Irregularities in Spontaneous Discourse

Background and aims

A substantial minority of autistic individuals score within typical ranges on standard language tests, suggesting that autism does not necessarily affect language acquisition. This idea is reflected in current diagnostic criteria for autism, wherein language impairment is no longer included. However, some work has suggested that probing autistic speakers' language carefully may reveal subtle differences between autistic and nonautistic people's language that cannot be captured by standardized language testing. The current study aims to test this idea, by determining whether a group of autistic and nonautistic individuals who score similarly on a standardized test show differences in the number of unconventional and erroneous language features they produce in a spontaneous language sample.

Methods

Thirty-eight older children and adolescents (19 autistic; 19 nonautistic), between the ages of 10 and 18, were recruited. Both participant groups scored within normal ranges on standardized language and IQ tests. Participants engaged in a "double interview" with an experimenter, during which they were first asked questions by the experimenter about themselves, and then they switched roles, so that it was the participant's turn to ask the experimenter questions. Participants' language during the interview was transcribed and analyzed for linguistic irregularities, including both semantic anomalies and morphosyntactic errors.

Results

Group membership accounted for significant variance in irregularity frequency; autistic participants produced more linguistic irregularities than nonautistic participants. Scores on a standardized language test did not improve model fit. Secondary analyses involving irregularity type (semantic vs. morphosyntactic) showed that group differences were primarily driven by relatively high numbers of semantic unconventionalities produced by the autistic group. While the autistic group made more morphosyntactic errors than the nonautistic group, differences in these numbers were only marginally significant.

Conclusions and implications

These findings suggest that a commonly used standardized language test does not adequately predict the number and perhaps type of language irregularities produced by some older autistic children and adolescents during spontaneous discourse. Results also suggest that differences in language use, especially semantic differences, may characterize autistic language, even the language produced by people who score within normal ranges on standardized language tests. It is debatable whether differences reflect underlying language impairments and/or a linguistic style adopted/preferred by autistic speakers. In this paper, we discuss both possibilities and offer suggestions to future research for teasing these possibilities apart.

The contribution of discursive and cognitive factors in referential choices made by elderly people during a narrative task

The present study focuses on referential choices made by healthy aged adults during narrative discourse, and their relationship with cognitive and socio-cognitive abilities. Previously, some studies have shown that, compared to young adults, older adults produce more pronouns when referring to various entities during discourse, regardless of the accessibility level of the referent for the addressee. This referential behavior has been interpreted in relation to the decrease of cognitive abilities, such as working memory abilities. There is, as of yet, little empirical evidence highlighting which cognitive competences preferentially support referential choices during discourse production. Here, we focus on three categories of referential markers (indefinite, definite markers and pronouns) produced by 78 participants from 60 to 91 years old. We used a storytelling task enabling us to examine the referential choices made at three discourse stages (introduction, maintaining or shift of the referent in focus) and in increasing levels of referential complexity (one vs two characters, and different vs same gender). In addition to specifically assessing how increasing age influences referential choices, we also examine the contribution of various cognitive and socio-cognitive skills that are presumed to play a specific role in referential choices. We found that both age and specific cognitive abilities (planification, inhibition, and verbal episodic memory) had an effect on referential choices, but that these effects depended on when (at which discourse stage) the referential markers were produced. Overall, our study highlights the complex interplay between discursive and cognitive factors in referential choices made by healthy older speakers.

Examining whether adults with autism spectrum disorder encounter multiple problems in theory of mind: a study based on meta-analysis

Theory of mind (ToM) represents a complex ability, while persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) encounter difficulties in the processing of ToM. The present ToM-focused studies on adults with ASD report inconsistent results, possibly owing to the differences between tasks. For instance, different ToM-related tasks involve different cognitive abilities, but the development of these cognitive abilities is different among adults with ASD, thereby leading to different behaviors by the same individual with ASD in different tasks. Therefore, it is of vital significance to explore the potential reasons for inconsistencies in the existing studies based on the task classification perspective. Hence, this study primarily reviews the existing ToM tasks used in studies on adults with ASD; afterward, based on the forms and characteristics of the task, the current ToM tasks are classified into four categories-reading comprehension, perceptual scene comprehension, comprehensive scene comprehension , and self-other processing. Subsequently, a meta-analysis is undertaken to determine the difference in each ToM task category between the ASD group and the typically developing (TD) group. As a result, 110 research papers (including 3,205 adults with ASD and 3,675 TD adults) that fulfilled the stated criteria are examined in this study. The study findings suggest that adults with ASD demonstrate worse performance in terms of all four ToM task categories as compared to TD adults. Furthermore, compared with tasks of self-other processing and perceptual scene comprehension, adults with ASD perform worse in reading comprehension and comprehensive scene comprehension. This shows that the differences between tasks may exert a potential influence on the study results. Future studies should focus on different abilities involved in ToM processing and the choice of ToM tasks, in order to elucidate the critical problems of ToM in adults with ASD.

Analysis of Noun Phrase Ambiguity in Narratives Reveals Differences in Referential Establishment But Not Cohesion for Older Autistic Children

PURPOSE

Stories told by autistic narrators often contain relatively frequent use of ambiguous references. However, it remains unclear whether this ambiguity is driven by ambiguous character establishment (e.g., "Once upon a time, she/the girl…") and/or ambiguous cohesion (e.g., "Two girls lived in a castle. She/The girl…"). In this study, we directly compared rates of each type of ambiguity within and between narratives told by autistic and non-autistic children, to determine which type of ambiguity is relatively more common in narratives told by autistic children.

METHOD

Thirty-three 10- to 17-year-old autistic participants (n = 17) and non-autistic peers (n = 16), who were not statistically different in age, standardized language scores, and IQ scores (p > .8 for all), watched two short animated videos alone and then described the videos' events to two listeners who were openly unfamiliar with the videos. We transcribed video recordings of narratives and coded all referential noun phrases (NPs) as either clear or ambiguous. We further categorized ambiguous NPs as either ineffective introduction or ineffective cohesion.

RESULTS

Autistic children produced significantly higher rates of ambiguous establishment than non-autistic peers, whereas between-group comparisons' rates of ambiguous cohesion were not statistically significant.

CONCLUSIONS

Older children on the autism spectrum show differences in the way they introduce characters, selecting NP types that are only appropriate when their listener is already familiar with the referent. In contrast, once they have introduced characters, they show cohesive skills that are comparable to those of non-autistic peers. Findings support theories arguing that autistic children show differences in their application of social pragmatic principles (listener/context-specific pragmatic rules), whereas their use of linguistic pragmatics (context-independent rules) is similar to that of non-autistic peers.

Forensic interviews conducted with autistic adults in Japan: a review of the literature and directions for future research

The interviewing of victims, witnesses and suspects is important in helping resolve criminal investigations. In Japan, developments have recently occurred in the training of the police and their public prosecutors in these key tasks. Whilst literature exists on autism in Japan, studies examining police/public prosecutor interviews with autistic adults conducted in that country (and indeed, any other) remain scant. As elsewhere in the world, identification of those who manifest characteristics prevalent on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) scale, has been found to be problematical to criminal justice professionals. To help address this deficit in understanding, we provide an overview of the literature concerning contemporary understanding of the challenges facing autistic adults as they attempt to reveal their verbal accounts, as well as suggested techniques when interviewing adults on the ASD scale during criminal investigations, offering lessons learned from research conducted around the world that provide potentially promising solutions for Japan.

Mentalizing and narrative coherence in autistic adults: Cerebellar sequencing and prediction

BYLEMANS, T., et al. Mentalizing and narrative coherence in autistic adults: Cerebellar sequencing and prediction. NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV REV, 2022. - This review focuses on autistic adults and serves 4 purposes: (1) providing an overview of their difficulties regarding mentalizing (understanding others' mental states) and narrative coherence (structured storytelling), (2) highlighting the relations between both skills by examining behavioral observations and shared neural substrates, (3) providing an integrated perspective regarding novel diagnostic tools and support services, and (4) raising awareness of adult autism. We suggest that mentalizing and narrative coherence are related at the behavioral level and neural level. In addition to the traditional mentalizing network, the cerebellum probably serves as an important hub in shared cerebral networks implicated in mentalizing and narrative coherence. Future autism research and support services should tackle new questions within a framework of social cerebellar (dys)functioning.

Referential expressions in monolingual and bilingual children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A study of informativeness and definiteness

The current study evaluated the separate and combined effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on informativeness and definiteness marking of referential expressions. Hebrew-speaking monolingual children (21 with ASD and 28 with typical language development) and Russian-Hebrew-speaking bilingual children (13 with ASD and 30 with typical language development) aged 4-9 years participated. Informativeness, indexed by referential contrasts, was affected by ASD, but not by bilingualism. Definiteness use was non-target-like in children with ASD and in bilingual children, and it was mainly predicted by children's morpho-syntactic abilities in Hebrew. Language-universal and language-specific properties of referential use are discussed.

An evolutionary account of impairment of self in cognitive disorders

Recent research has proposed that certain aspects of psychosis, as experienced in, e.g., schizophrenia (SCZ), but also aspects of other cognitive conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and synesthesia, can be related to a shattered sense of the notion of self. In this paper, our goal is to show that altered processing of self can be attributed to an abnormal functioning of cortico-striatal brain networks supporting, among other, one key human distinctive cognitive ability, namely cross-modality, which plays multiple roles in human cognition and language. Specifically, our hypothesis is that this cognitive mechanism sheds light both on some basic aspects of the minimal self and on some aspects related to higher forms of self, such as the narrative self. We further link the atypical functioning in these conditions to some recent evolutionary changes in our species, specifically, an atypical presentation of human self-domestication (HSD) features. In doing so, we also lean on previous work concerning the link between cognitive disorders and language evolution under the effects of HSD. We further show that this approach can unify both linguistic and non-linguistic symptoms of these conditions through deficits in the notion of self. Our considerations provide further support for the hypothesis that SCZ and ASD are diametrically opposed cognitive conditions, as well for the hypothesis that their etiology is associated with recent human evolution, leading to a deeper understanding of the causes and symptoms of these disorders, and providing new cues, which can be used for an earlier and more accurate diagnostics.

Linguistic markers of autism spectrum conditions in narratives: A comprehensive analysis

Background & Aims: Narratives are regularly elicited as part of standardized assessments for autism spectrum conditions (ASC) such as the ADOS, but have rarely been utilized as linguistic data in their own right. We here aimed for a specific and comprehensive quantitative linguistic profile of such narratives across nominal, verbal, and clausal domains of grammatical organization, and error patterns. Methods: We manually transcribed and annotated narratives elicited from the ADOS from a sample of bilingual autistic Spanish-Catalan children (n = 18), matched with typically developing controls (n = 18) on vocabulary-based verbal IQ. Results: Results revealed fewer relative clauses and more frequent errors in referential specificity and non-relational content-word choice in ASC. Frequent error types are also discussed qualitatively. Conclusions & Implications: These findings, based on more finegrained linguistically defined variables, help to disentangle previous inconsistencies in the literature, and to better situate language changes in the spectrum of neurocognitive changes in this population.

Autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits differ from non-autistic adults in social-pragmatic inferencing and narrative discourse

Since prior research has mostly focused on children, less is known about how autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits interpret pragmatically complex social situations and the kind of narrative discourse they produce. 32 autistic young adults, 18 young adults with sub-clinical autistic traits and 34 non-autistic young adults participated this study. They were shown videos of social interactions which required complex pragmatic processing and were asked to freely narrate what they thought was occurring in each video. Their narratives were coded for aspects of social-pragmatic and narrative discourse. The results indicate that the autistic and sub-clinical groups differed from the comparison group in what they inferred as relevant video content. The narratives of the autistic group also differed from the comparison group in meaning, focus and emphasis on details. In addition, the comparison group produced more holistic narratives whereas the autistic and sub-clinical groups produced more atomistic narratives. Correlational findings indicated that perceptual reasoning has stronger associations with pragmatic inferencing in the autistic and sub-clinical groups than in the comparison group. This study suggests that autistic adults and adults with sub-clinical autistic traits differ from non-autistic adults in what they perceive to be relevant in their social world.

Lay Abstract

Previous social-pragmatic and narrative research involving autistic individuals has mostly focused on children. Little is known about how autistic adults and adults who have autistic traits but do not have a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) interpret complex social situations and tell narratives about these situations. We asked 32 autistic young adults, 18 adults with autistic traits but no ASD diagnosis, and 34 non-autistic young adults to watch socially complex situations and freely tell narratives about what they thought was occurring in each situation. These narratives were analysed for how the participants had interpreted the situations and for the type of narratives they produced. We found that the groups had both similarities and differences. Regarding the differences, we found that the autistic adults and adults with autistic traits interpreted the situations differently from the non-autistic adults. The autistic adults found different aspects of the situations relevant, had different foci and placed greater importance on details than the non-autistic adults. The autistic adults and adults with autistic traits also differed from the non-autistic adults by having more detail- and event-focused narratives whereas the non-autistic adults were more likely to base their narratives on their own broad interpretations of the situations. Perceptual processing styles appeared to play a bigger role in interpreting the situations for the autistic adults and adults with autistic traits than the non-autistic adults. Our findings suggest that autistic adults and adults with autistic traits focus on different aspects in their social world than non-autistic adults.

A narrative sequencing and mentalizing training for adults with autism: A pilot study

Adults diagnosed with autism experience difficulties with understanding the mental states of others, or themselves (mentalizing) and with adequately sequencing personal stories (narrative coherence). Given that the posterior cerebellum is implicated in both skills, as well as in the etiology of autism, we developed a narrative sequencing and mentalizing training for autistic adults. Participants with an official autism diagnosis were randomly assigned to a Training group (n = 17) or a waiting-list Control group (n = 15). The Training group took part in six weekly sessions in groups of three participants lasting each about 60 min. During training, participants had to (re)tell stories from the perspective of the original storyteller and answer questions that required mentalizing. We found significant improvements in mentalizing about others’ beliefs and in narrative coherence for the Training group compared to the Control group immediately after the training compared to before the training. Almost all participants from the Training group expressed beneficial effects of the training on their mood and half of the participants reported positive effects on their self-confidence in social situations. All participants recommended the current training to others. Results are discussed in light of cerebellar theories on sequencing of social actions during mentalizing. Further improvements to the program are suggested. Our results highlight the potential clinical utility of adopting a neuroscience-informed approach to developing novel therapeutic interventions for autistic populations.

Pretense Awareness Context and Autism: Insights from Conversation Analysis

Utilizing approaches from Conversation Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics, this study investigates linguistic resources related to discourse while playing a tabletop roleplaying game, with particular investigation around the discourse of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. The study examines interactions as they take place across three frames that are associated with interaction in this community of practice: the primary frame, the metagaming frame, and the character frame. The study found that the participants with autism frequently violated the stable pretense awareness context that persists across these frames in tabletop roleplaying game discourse. This research has implications for social skills training methods and psychological models of autism symptomatology.

Dialogic Priming and Dynamic Resonance in Autism: Creativity Competing with Engagement in Chinese Children with ASD

A growing body of research has focused on the relationship between priming and engagement through dialogue (e.g. Tantucci and Wang in Appl Linguist 43(1):115-146, 2022; Mikulincer et al. in Cognit Emotion 25:519-531, 2011). The present study addresses this issue also in relation to creativity and provides a new applied model to measure intersubjective engagement in ASD vs neurotypical populations' speech. We compared two balanced corpora of naturalistic Mandarin interaction of typically developing children and children diagnosed with ASD (cf. Zhou and Zhang in Xueqian jiaoyu yanjiu [Stud Preschool Educ] 6:72-84, 2020). We fitted a mixed effects linear regression showing that in both neurotypical and ASD populations, dialogic priming significantly correlates with engagement and with whether the child could creatively re-use the original input to produce a new construction. What we found is that creativity and intersubjective engagement are in competition in children with ASD in contrast with the neurotypical population. This finding points to a relatively impeded ability in ASD to re-combine creatively a priming input during the here-and-now of a dialogic event.

Modern Foreign Approaches to the Assessment of Different Linguistic Levels in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

<p>The article presents an overview of studies on the problem of speech evaluation in childhood. We analyzed the material based on the model that describes 4 levels of language: phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. The article contains the analysis of studies describing each level of language as well as existing approaches to its assessment, and reviews studies on language impairments in children with autism spectrum disorders. Additionally, the article contains a detailed analysis of existing foreign and Russian standardized methods for assessing speech development, showing which level of language organization (among each of the mentioned above methods) allows us to assess. It also describes the assessment procedures and evaluation. The review systematizes the available data on the approaches to atypical speech development in children with autism spectrum disorders.</p>

How do autistic adults use syntactic and prosodic cues to manage spoken discourse?

Discourse studies investigating differences in the socio-communicative profiles of autistic (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) individuals have mostly relied on orthographic transcriptions, without taking prosodic information into account. However, atypical prosody is ubiquitous in ASD and a more accurate representation of their discourse abilities should also include prosodic cues. This exploratory study addresses this gap by segmenting the spoken discourse of 12 ASD and NT adults using the framework of Basic Discourse Units (BDUs). BDUs result from the mapping of syntactic boundaries on prosodic units, which can coincide in different ways and are associated with different discourse strategies. We hypothesized that the discourse of ASD adults would display more atypical strategies than NT adults, reflecting a 'pedantic' style and more difficulties in managing ongoing discourse. While ASD adults did not produce more discourse units associated with didactic or pedantic strategies than NT adults, they did produce less units associated with strategies of interactional regulation. This study provides initial evidence that multidimensional linguistic units, such as BDUs can help differentiate speech delivery strategies of ASD adults from those of their NT peers, even based on simple prosodic cues like silent pauses.

Veritable Untruths: Autistic Traits and the Processing of Deception

How do we decide whether a statement is literally true? Here, we contrast participants’ eventual evaluations of a speaker’s meaning with the real-time processes of comprehension. We record participants’ eye movements as they respond to potentially misleading instructions to click on one of two objects which might be concealing treasure (the treasure is behind thee, uh, hat). Participants are less likely to click on the named object when the instructions are disfluent. However, when hearing disfluent utterances, a tendency to fixate the named object early increases with participants’ autism quotient scores. This suggests that, even where utterances are equivalently understood, the processes by which interpretations are achieved vary across individuals.

Focus on the Narrative Skills of Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder and High Functioning Autism

Purpose: Narratives of personal experiences emerge early in language acquisition and are particularly commonly experienced in children’s daily lives. To produce these stories, children need to develop narrative, linguistic, and social-cognitive skills. Research has shown that these skills are impaired in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and high functioning autism (HFA).

Aim: This study aimed to determine whether narrative skills are still impaired in adolescence and to highlight the language similarities and differences between teenagers with DLD and HFA in the production of a narrative of a personal experience.

Method: Ten teenagers with DLD, 10 teenagers with HFA and 10 typically developing (TD) teenagers, matched on chronological age, told a narrative of a personal experience. These stories were analyzed to evaluate narrative skills through coherence (respect of the narrative schema) and cohesion (anaphora and connectors) and social-cognitive skills (affective and cognitive mental states of the characters, and arbitrary vocalizations such as voice noises).

Results: Teenagers with DLD were less compliant with the complication step in the narrative schema than teenagers with HFA or TD. No difference was observed between the three groups of teenagers in terms of cohesion or regarding the positive and negative social-cognitive skills used in narratives.

Conclusion: When producing a narrative of a personal experience, HFA teens do not have difficulties neither with narrative skills and with social-cognitive skills assessed in this paper. In DLD the profile of the teens is not the same: They do not have difficulties with social-cognitive skills and with a part of narrative skills (cohesion), and they have difficulties with the narrative schema.

Brief Report: Sentencing Outcomes for Offenders on the Autism Spectrum

Although people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are not more likely to commit crimes, they are overrepresented in the criminal justice system as reported by Howlin (Autism and Asperger syndrome: Preparing for adulthood, Routledge, 2004). This may, in part, be due to unfavourable interactions with the criminal judiciary. Evidence suggests the autistic population are perceived unfavourably in adjudicative proceedings resulting in harsher penalties. The present study explores whether ASD offenders (ASD-O) receive longer sentences compared to national sentencing data. Sentencing data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) were used to compare ASD-O with similar offences. ASD-O attracted longer sentences across all offence classifications. Inferential analyses indicated sexual assault sentences were significantly higher in the ASD-O sample. No significant differences were found for murder, manslaughter, and assault.

EXPRESS: Comparing individual and collective management of referential choices in dialogue

Past research shows that when a discourse referent is mentioned repeatedly, it is usually introduced with a full NP and maintained with a reduced form such as a pronoun. Is this also the case in dialogue, where the same referent may be introduced by one person and maintained by another person? An experiment was conducted in which participants either told entire stories to each other or told stories together, thus enabling us to contrast situations in which characters were introduced and maintained by the same person (control condition) and situations in which the introduction and the maintaining of each character were performed by different people (alternating condition). Story complexity was also manipulated through the introduction of one or two characters in each story. We found that participants were less likely to use reduced forms to maintain referents in the alternating condition. The use of reduced forms also depended on the context in which the referent was maintained (in particular, first or second mention of a character) and on story complexity. These results shed light on how the pressure to signal understanding to one's conversational partner affects referential choices throughout the interaction.

Supporting autistic adults' episodic memory recall in interviews: The role of executive functions, theory of mind, and language abilities

Autistic people have difficulties recalling episodic memories, including retrieving fewer or less specific and detailed memories compared to typically developing people. However, the ability to effectively recall episodic memories is crucial in many real-world contexts, such as the criminal justice system, medical consultations, and employment interviews. Autistic people’s episodic memory difficulties are most apparent when open, unsupportive questions are used. The ‘Task Support Hypothesis’ posits that autistic people can recall as much information as typically developing people with more supportive questioning. Alongside problems retrieving episodic memories, autistic people also experience difficulties with executive functioning, theory of mind, and expressive language. The current study aimed to assess the impact of these abilities on recall in two previous studies by the authors that compared autistic and typically developing adults on recall specificity in police, healthcare, and employment interviews, and recall quality in employment interviews under unsupported and supported questioning. Under unsupported questioning only, autistic adults’ episodic autobiographical memory recall specificity was predicted by expressive language, whereas for the typically developing group, only theory of mind was a significant predictor. No other predictors were significant across the study. Implications for the task support hypothesis are discussed.

Preserved Perspective Taking in Free Indirect Discourse in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Perspective taking has been proposed to be impaired in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially when implicit processing is required. In narrative texts, language perception and interpretation is fundamentally guided by taking the perspective of a narrator. We studied perspective taking in the linguistic domain of so-called Free Indirect Discourse (FID), during which certain text segments have to be interpreted as the thoughts or utterances of a protagonist without explicitly being marked as thought or speech representations of that protagonist (as in direct or indirect discourse). Crucially, the correct interpretation of text segments as FID depends on the ability to detect which of the protagonists "stands out" against the others and is therefore identifiable as implicit thinker or speaker. This so-called "prominence" status of a protagonist is based on linguistic properties (e.g., grammatical function, referential expression), in other words, the perspective is "hidden" and has to be inferred from the text material. In order to test whether this implicit perspective taking ability that is required for the interpretation of FID is preserved in persons with ASD, we presented short texts with three sentences to adults with and without ASD. In the last sentence, the perspective was switched either to the more or the less prominent of two protagonists. Participants were asked to rate the texts regarding their naturalness. Both diagnostic groups rated sentences with FID anchored to the less prominent protagonist as less natural than sentences with FID anchored to the more prominent protagonist. Our results that the high-level perspective taking ability in written language that is required for the interpretation of FID is well preserved in persons with ASD supports the conclusion that language skills are highly elaborated in ASD so that even the challenging attribution of utterances to protagonists is possible if they are only implicitly given. We discuss the implications in the context of claims of impaired perspective taking in ASD as well as with regard to the underlying processing of FID.

Structural and Contextual Cues in Third-Person Pronoun Interpretation by Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Neurotypical Peers

This study investigates the use of structural and discourse contextual cues in the interpretation of third-person pronouns by children and adolescents with autism and their neurotypical peers. Results show that referent-biasing contextual information influences pronominal interpretation and modulates looking patterns in both groups compared to a context-neutral condition. These results go against the predictions of Weak Central Coherence and the notion that pragmatics in general is impaired in ASD, since the ASD group was able to use details in discourse context to influence the pronominal interpretation process. However, although discourse context influenced looking patterns in both groups, the groups nevertheless diverged in the nature of these patterns, suggesting that behavioral differences may emerge in more complicated discourse tasks.

A Unique Visual Attention Profile Associated With the FMR1 Premutation

Atypical visual attention patterns have been observed among carriers of the fragile X mental retardation gene (FMR1) premutation (PM), with some similarities to visual attention patterns observed in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and among clinically unaffected relatives of individuals with ASD. Patterns of visual attention could constitute biomarkers that can help to inform the neurocognitive profile of the PM, and that potentially span diagnostic boundaries. This study examined patterns of eye movement across an array of fixation measurements from three distinct eye-tracking tasks in order to investigate potentially overlapping profiles of visual attention among PM carriers, ASD parents, and parent controls. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine whether variables constituting a PM-specific looking profile were able to effectively predict group membership. Participants included 65PM female carriers, 188 ASD parents, and 84 parent controls. Analyses of fixations across the eye-tracking tasks, and their corresponding areas of interest, revealed a distinct visual attention pattern in carriers of the FMR1 PM, characterized by increased fixations on the mouth when viewing faces, more intense focus on bodies in socially complex scenes, and decreased fixations on salient characters and faces while narrating a wordless picture book. This set of variables was able to successfully differentiate individuals with the PM from controls (Sensitivity = 0.76, Specificity = 0.85, Accuracy = 0.77) as well as from ASD parents (Sensitivity = 0.70, Specificity = 0.80, Accuracy = 0.72), but did not show a strong distinction between ASD parents and controls (Accuracy = 0.62), indicating that this set of variables comprises a profile that is unique to PM carriers. Regarding predictive power, fixations toward the mouth when viewing faces was able to differentiate PM carriers from both ASD parents and controls, whereas fixations toward other social stimuli did not differentiate PM carriers from ASD parents, highlighting some overlap in visual attention patterns that could point toward shared neurobiological mechanisms. Results demonstrate a profile of visual attention that appears strongly associated with the FMR1 PM in women, and may constitute a meaningful biomarker.

Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD: Elicited production of passives

Children with ASD and an IQ-matched control group of typically developing (TD) children completed an elicited-production task which encouraged the production of reversible passive sentences (e.g., "Bob was hit by Wendy"). Although the two groups showed similar levels of correct production, the ASD group produced a significantly greater number of "reversal" errors (e.g., "Wendy was hit by Bob", when, in fact Wendy hit Bob) than the TD group (who, when they did not produce correct passives, instead generally produced semantically appropriate actives; e.g., "Wendy hit Bob"). These findings suggest that the more formal elements of syntax are spared relative to more semantic/pragmatic/narrative aspects (e.g., manipulating thematic roles) in at least high-functioning children with ASD.

Colorful Semantics in Cypriot-Greek-Speaking Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

OBJECTIVES

The aims of this study were: (1) to investigate the effect of colorful semantics (CS) on the morphosyntactic and semantic development of Cypriot-Greek (CG)-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to obtain a better understanding of its role in an augmentative communication (AC) intervention program; (2) to address the paucity of intervention tools geared for CG-speaking children with ASD.

PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS

The study included 24 boys and 16 girls with ASD, all preschool-aged 4-6 years. All were verbal but with limited production and minimal mean length of utterance. The study followed a randomized control trial design with equally sized experimental and control groups. The experimental group followed a therapeutic program using the AC with a CS protocol, while the control group's AC intervention did not include the CS protocol.

RESULTS

The use of CS significantly improved the children's semantic and morphosyntactic development.

CONCLUSIONS

The intervention results illustrate the effectiveness of CS in this study; however, generalizability of effectiveness to other similar CG-speaking children with ASD requires further evidence.

Pragmatic Language in Children and Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Do Theory of Mind and Executive Functions Have a Mediating Role?

Pragmatic language (PL) is defined as the ability to use language effectively in communicative exchanges. Previous findings showed that deficits in PL are a core characteristic of the communicative profile of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). While different lines of research have revealed a close link between PL and theory of mind (ToM), and between PL and executive functions (EFs), to our knowledge, few studies have explored the relationship between these three domains in children with ASD, and their results have been contradictory. The present study thus aimed to contribute to our understanding of PL in children with ASD and to analyze the underlying mediating role of ToM and EFs. PL is a complex and multifaceted construct. In the present study, we focused on two specific aspects, such as the comprehension of nonliteral language, and the ability to make inferences. After testing 143 participants (73 with ASD), our results confirmed that impairments in PL are a crucial feature of the ASD profile. Children with ASD were also more impaired than their typically developing peers in both ToM and EFs. When the mediating role of ToM and EFs on PL was considered, it emerged that only ToM contributed significantly to the relationship between group and PL. We discussed the potential importance of interventions not focused exclusively on PL, but also involving ToM. LAY SUMMARY: In everyday life, we use pragmatic language to interact successfully with others. Individuals with autism experience significant difficulty in pragmatic language, showing consequent impairments in communication. This study compared the comprehension of nonliteral language, and the ability to make inferences of children with autism and children with typical development, focusing on the role of social and cognitive abilities. Children with autism had difficulties in pragmatic language compared to children with typical development. In addition, the capacity to consider the perspective, intentions and beliefs of other people contributed significantly to the pragmatic language. Autism Res 2021, 14: 932-945. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Eliciting Language Samples for Analysis (ELSA): A New Protocol for Assessing Expressive Language and Communication in Autism

Expressive language and communication are among the key targets of interventions for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and natural language samples provide an optimal approach for their assessment. Currently, there are no protocols for collecting such samples that cover a wide range of ages or language abilities, particularly for children/adolescents who have very limited spoken language. We introduce a new protocol for collecting language samples, eliciting language samples for analysis (ELSA), and a novel approach for deriving basic measures of verbal communicative competence from it that bypasses the need for time-consuming transcription. Study 1 presents ELSA-adolescents (ELSA-A), designed for minimally and low-verbal older children/adolescents with ASD. The protocol successfully engaged and elicited speech from 46 participants across a wide range of ages (6;6-19;7) with samples averaging 20-25 min. The collected samples were segmented into speaker utterances (examiner and participant) using real-time coding as one is listening to the audio recording and two measures were derived: frequency of utterances and conversational turns per minute. These measures were shown to be reliable and valid. For Study 2, ELSA was adapted for younger children (ELSA-Toddler [ELSA-T]) with samples averaging 29 min from 19 toddlers (2;8-4;10 years) with ASD. Again, measures of frequency of utterances and conversational turns derived from ELSA-T were shown to have strong psychometric properties. In Study 3, we found that ELSA-A and ELSA-T were equivalent in eliciting language from 17 children with ASD (ages: 4;0-6;8), demonstrating their suitability for deriving robust objective assessments of expressive language that could be used to track change in ability over time. We introduce a new protocol for collecting expressive language samples, ELSA, that can be used with a wide age range, from toddlers (ELSA-T) to older adolescents (ELSA-A) with ASD who have minimal or low-verbal abilities. The measures of language and communication derived from them, frequency of utterances, and conversational turns per minute, using real-time coding methods, can be used to characterize ability and chart change in intervention research. LAY SUMMARY: We introduce a new protocol for collecting expressive language samples, ELSA, that can be used with a wide age range, from toddlers (ELSA-T) to older adolescents (ELSA-A) with autism spectrum disorder who have minimal or low-verbal abilities. The measures of language and communication derived from them, frequency of utterances and conversational turns per minute, using real-time coding methods, can be used to characterize ability and chart change in intervention research.

Referential adjustment during discourse production in Alzheimer's disease

Several studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) tend to use more pronouns than healthy aged adults when referring to entities during discourse. This referential behavior has been associated with the decrease of cognitive abilities, such as lexical retrieval difficulties or reduced abilities in working memory. However, the influence of certain important discourse factors on the referential choices made by people with AD has yet to be established. This study examines referential choices made at three discourse stages during narrative discourse (the introduction of a referent, the maintaining of the referent in focus, and the shift from one referent in focus to another). These referential choices are examined in increasingly complex referential contexts. In addition, this study investigates the relationships between referential choices and various cognitive abilities. To do so, the narrative discourses of 21 people with AD and 21 healthy adults were elicited using a newly developed storytelling in sequence task. The analyses focused on the production of three major referential expressions (indefinite expressions, definite expressions and pronouns) which are expected to vary according to discourse stage and the referential complexity of the stories. The results show that AD participants produce significantly fewer of the referential expressions expected at the introduction and shift stages than healthy aged adults produce. Nevertheless, the variation in the categories of referential expressions produced by the AD participants between the discourse stages is similar to that produced by the healthy aged adults, suggesting a preserved sensitivity to the factors manipulated in the task (i.e., discourse stages and referential complexity). This study also highlights the fact that different cognitive competences, especially executive abilities, are greatly involved in referential choices. The results add further evidence that referential choices rely on a variety of cognitive skills, depending on the discourse context in which they are made.

The Witness-Aimed First Account (WAFA): A new technique for interviewing autistic witnesses and victims

LAY ABSTRACT

Autistic people may be more likely to be interviewed by police as a victim/witness, yet they experience social communication difficulties alongside specific memory difficulties that can impact their ability to recall information from memory. Police interviewing techniques do not take account of these differences, and so are often ineffective. We developed a new technique for interviewing autistic witnesses, referred to a Witness-Aimed First Account, which was designed to better support differences in the way that autistic witnesses process information in memory. The Witness-Aimed First Account technique encourages witnesses to first segment the witnessed event into discrete, parameter-bound event topics, which are then displayed on post-it notes while the witness goes onto freely recall as much information as they can from within each parameter-bound topic in turn. Since witnessed events are rarely cohesive stories with a logical chain of events, we also explored autistic and non-autistic witnesses' recall when the events were witnessed in a random (nonsensical) order. Thirty-three autistic and 30 typically developing participants were interviewed about their memory for two videos depicting criminal events. Clip segments of one video were 'scrambled', disrupting the event's narrative structure; the other video was watched intact. Although both autistic and non-autistic witnesses recalled fewer details with less accuracy from the scrambled video, Witness-Aimed First Account interviews resulted in more detailed and accurate recall from both autistic and non-autistic witnesses, for both scrambled and unscrambled videos. The Witness-Aimed First Account technique may be a useful tool to improve witnesses' accounts within a legally appropriate, non-leading framework.

Comparing the writing skills of autistic and nonautistic university students: A collaboration with autistic university students

LAY ABSTRACT

We do not know very much about the writing skills of autistic university students. Studies with autistic children and teenagers show that some autistic young people have difficulties writing. Other autistic people are talented writers. In fact, some autistic people would rather write than speak. Good writers often imagine other people's points of view when writing. Autistic people sometimes have difficulties understanding others' points of view. Yet, autistic people often work much harder to understand others' points of view than not-autistic people do. We collaborated with autistic university student researchers to see if autistic university students are better or worse at writing than nonautistic students. Autistic university students in our study were better writers than nonautistic students. Autistic students in our study had higher nonverbal intelligence than nonautistic students. Autistic students also put themselves under more pressure to write perfectly than nonautistic students did. Autistic students did not show any difficulties understanding other minds. This study shows that some autistic university students have stronger writing skills and higher intelligence than nonautistic university students. Yet, autistic students may be too hard on themselves about their writing. Fun activities that help students explore their ideas without pressure (like theater games) may help autistic students be less hard on their writing. Teachers can help autistic students express themselves through writing by encouraging them to write about their interests, by giving them enough time to write, and by letting them write using computers if they want to. This study shows that collaborations with autistic people can help us understand strengths that can help autistic people succeed.

The impact of bilingualism on the narrative ability and the executive functions of children with autism spectrum disorders

While there is ample evidence that monolingual children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) face difficulties with narrative story-telling and executive functions (EF), there is considerable uncertainty about how bilingualism impacts these skills in autism. The current study explores the effect of bilingualism on the narrative and EF skills of forty 7-to-12-year-old bilingual and monolingual children with ASD, as well as forty age-matched bilingual and monolingual children of typical development (TD). Narrative production data were elicited using the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider et al., 2005), which was developed to measure narrative production at a microstructural and macrostructural level. The same children were administered two EF tasks, namely, a global-local visual attention task and a 2-back working memory task. In story-telling, bilingual children with ASD achieved higher scores than monolingual children with ASD on story structure complexity and use of adverbial clauses, and they tended to use significantly fewer ambiguous referential forms than their monolingual peers with ASD. In the global-local task, bilingual children with ASD were faster and more accurate in global trials than monolingual children with ASD, who tended to be more susceptible to interference from locally presented information than the other experimental groups. Higher accuracy and faster response times were also observed for bilingual children with ASD in the 2-back task. Further correlation analyses between the story-telling and EF tasks revealed that bilingual children with ASD drew on a broader range of EF in narrative production than their monolingual peers. The overall findings reveal that bilingual children with ASD outperformed their monolingual peers with ASD in both the microstructure and macrostructure of their narrative production, as well as in their visual attention and working memory skills.

A Preliminary Study of Writing Skills in Adolescents with Autism Across Persuasive, Expository, and Narrative Genres

Writing is often difficult for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet relatively little literature exists that profiles specific strengths and needs within this area. This preliminary investigation compares the written language skills of adolescents with ASD without intellectual disability (n = 14) to typically developing (TD) adolescents (n = 12). Writing samples from persuasive, expository, and narrative genres were elicited. Variables of sample length, writing productivity, syntax, lexical diversity, and macrostructure were analyzed. In the persuasive and expository genres, the ASD group scored significantly lower than the TD group on sample length and some aspects of macrostructure. The ASD group scored higher than the TD group on lexical diversity in the persuasive genre. Other comparisons yielded large effect sizes but were not statistically significant.

Assessment of Personal Narrative Writing in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

BACKGROUND

Research has demonstrated that writing may be challenging for many children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD; Mayes & Calhoun, 2006). In our study, we used linguistic analysis to identify and examine the personal narrative writing skills of children with ASD in comparison to neurotypical (NT) children.

METHOD

This study included 22 children with ASD and 22 NT children. Groups did not differ in terms of age, IQ, and language. Writing samples were coded and compared for aspects of microstructure (e.g., lexical and syntactic complexity, errors) and macrostructure (e.g., quality, or ratings of coherence, structure, and content). We also examined the link between theory of mind (ToM) and personal narrative writing. Of interest was whether ToM uniquely predicted writing performance after controlling for diagnostic group, chronological age, and language ability.

RESULTS

The texts of children with ASD were less syntactically diverse, contained more grammatical errors, and were reduced in overall quality compared to NT children. However, children with ASD did not differ from NT children in terms of lexical complexity, frequency of writing conventions errors, and use of evaluative devices. Overall, ToM uniquely predicted syntactic complexity and text quality in children.

CONCLUSIONS

Study findings showed that children with ASD demonstrate some challenges with personal narrative writing compared to NT children. Additionally, difficulty with narrative writing was linked to poorer ToM performance, particularly in children with ASD. Findings highlight the utility of obtaining a variety of writing outcomes, as well as mechanisms related to writing, when evaluating writing for educational decisions.

Effects of an adapted story grammar intervention on the listening comprehension of children with autism

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often develop the word reading skills necessary to read text but struggle with reading comprehension. Comprehension skills are often under addressed in early elementary settings leaving children with ASD at a disadvantage once they are expected to read for meaning. This study investigated the impact of an adapted story grammar intervention on the listening comprehension of five children with ASD in kindergarten through second grade. The intervention embedded evidence-based practices shown to support the learning of children with ASD during story grammar instruction. All participating children demonstrated increased correct responding to fact and inference questions following intervention. Data suggest that all participants required visuals to participate in and learn from the intervention. Social validity data indicate the classroom teacher perceived the intervention as helpful and feasible. Implications for instruction and future research are discussed.

A Different Conversation: Psychological Research and the Problem of Self in Autism

Observations about peculiarities in the autistic population concerning type and frequency of references to subjective states, and lack of perspective taking, have been on the whole referred to as the paradox of the autistic self, i.e. a co-presence of ego-centeredness and weak self-referentiality (Lombardo & Baron Cohen 2010). Prevalent approaches in autism ascribe these peculiarities to high order disfunctions caused by neurological factors, such as defective self-encoding processes. Two narratives told by an adult man with Asperger during counselling are examined with Conversation Analysis; the analysis identifies features that may lead to descriptions like the paradox of autistic self, but also reveals competences related to perspective-taking and narrative construction. Drawing on Bruner's narrative theory, as well on recent interactional research on autism and the psychology of self, it is suggested that a relatively limited practice with narrative co-construction might be at the origin of the peculiarities observed. A socio-developmental approach to the understanding of autism not only can provide explanations compatible with first and second person accounts of life with autism, but can also open new paths for researching ways of self-construction that are less reliant on social interaction. The article finally challenges assumptions in psychological research about the ability of humans to access their internal states, and discusses how such assumptions can deter understanding of atypical populations.

Subject and Object Pronouns in High-Functioning Children With ASD of a Null-Subject Language

Although the use of pronouns has been extensively investigated in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), most studies have focused on English, and no study to date has investigated the use of subject pronouns in null subject languages. The present study aims to fill this gap by investigating the use of subject and object pronouns in 5- to 8-year-old Greek-speaking high-functioning children with ASD compared to individually matched typically developing age and language controls. The “Frog where are you” (Mayer, 1969) narrative task was used to elicit subject and object pronouns as well as Determiner Phrases (DPs). Greek is a null subject language, and as a result, subject pronouns most often remain without phonological content. The findings showed that both groups used more null than overt subject pronouns, indicating that children with ASD know that Greek is a null subject language. TD children used more null subjects than subject DPs, whereas children with ASD used an equal proportion of null subjects and subject DPs. In terms of object pronouns, both groups produced more clitics and object DPs than strong object pronouns, but the difference between clitics and DPs did not reach significance in either of the groups. Importantly, the groups did not differ from each other in the use of ambiguous pronouns in both the subject and object position. The ASD children’s avoidance to use pronominal subjects can be taken as evidence that they use a strategy to avoid infelicitous reference. This would suggest that the ASD children’s difficulties with pronouns is not due to difficulties in core grammar.

Linguistic markers of autism in girls: evidence of a "blended phenotype" during storytelling

Background

Narrative abilities are linked to social impairment in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), such that reductions in words about cognitive processes (e.g., think, know) are thought to reflect underlying deficits in social cognition, including Theory of Mind. However, research suggests that typically developing (TD) boys and girls tell narratives in sex-specific ways, including differential reliance on cognitive process words. Given that most studies of narration in ASD have been conducted in predominantly male samples, it is possible that prior results showing reduced cognitive processing language in ASD may not generalize to autistic girls. To answer this question, we measured the relative frequency of two kinds of words in stories told by autistic girls and boys: nouns (words that indicate object-oriented storytelling) and cognitive process words (words like think and know that indicate mentalizing or attention to other peoples' internal states).

Methods

One hundred two verbally fluent school-aged children [girls with ASD (N = 21) and TD (N = 19), and boys with ASD (N = 41) and TD (N = 21)] were matched on age, IQ, and maternal education. Children told a story from a sequence of pictures, and word frequencies (nouns, cognitive process words) were compared.

Results

Autistic children of both sexes consistently produced a greater number of nouns than TD controls, indicating object-focused storytelling. There were no sex differences in cognitive process word use in the TD group, but autistic girls produced significantly more cognitive process words than autistic boys, despite comparable autism symptom severity. Thus, autistic girls showed a unique narrative profile that overlapped with autistic boys and typical girls/boys. Noun use correlated significantly with parent reports of social symptom severity in all groups, but cognitive process word use correlated with social ability in boys only.

Conclusion

This study extends prior research on autistic children's storytelling by measuring sex differences in the narratives of a relatively large, well-matched sample of children with and without ASD. Importantly, prior research showing that autistic children use fewer cognitive process words is true for boys only, while object-focused language is a sex-neutral linguistic marker of ASD. These findings suggest that sex-sensitive screening and diagnostic methods-preferably using objective metrics like natural language processing-may be helpful for identifying autistic girls, and could guide the development of future personalized treatment strategies.

Temporarily Out of Order: Temporal Perspective Taking in Language in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Clinical reports suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) struggle with time perception, but few studies have investigated this. This is the first study to examine these children's understanding of before and after. These temporal conjunctions have been argued to require additional cognitive effort when conjoining two events in a clause order that is incongruent with their order in time. Given the suggested time perception impairment and well-established cognitive deficits of children with ASD, we expected them to have difficulties interpreting temporal conjunctions, especially in an incongruent order. To investigate this, the interpretation of before and after in congruent and incongruent orders was examined in 48 children with ASD and 43 typically developing (TD) children (age 6-12). Additional tasks were administered to measure Theory of Mind (ToM), working memory (WM), cognitive inhibition, cognitive flexibility, IQ, and verbal ability. We found that children with ASD were less accurate in their interpretation of temporal conjunctions than their TD peers. Contrary to our expectations, they did not have particular difficulties in an incongruent order. Furthermore, older children showed better overall performance than younger children. The difference between children with ASD and TD children was explained by WM, ToM, IQ, and verbal ability, but not by cognitive inhibition and flexibility. These cognitive functions are more likely to be impaired in children with ASD than in TD children, which could account for their poorer performance. Thus, the cognitive factors found to affect the interpretation of temporal language in children with ASD are likely to apply in typical development as well. Sufficient WM capacity and verbal ability may help children to process complex sentences conjoined by a temporal conjunction. Additionally, ToM understanding was found to be related to children's interpretation of temporal conjunctions in an incongruent order, indicating that perspective taking is required when events are presented out of order. We conclude from this that perspective-taking abilities are needed for the interpretation of temporal conjunctions, either to shift one's own perspective as a hearer to another point in time, or to shift to the perspective of the speaker to consider the speaker's linguistic choices.

When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?

One feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a deficit in verbal reference production, that is, providing an appropriate amount of verbal information for the listener to refer to things, people, and events. However, very few studies have manipulated whether individuals with ASD can take a speaker's perspective to interpret verbal reference. A critical limitation of all interpretation studies is that comprehension of another's verbal reference required the participant to represent only the other's visual perspective. Yet, many everyday interpretations of verbal reference require knowledge of social perspective (i.e., a consideration of which experiences one has shared with which interlocutor). We investigated whether 22 5;0-7;11-year-old children with ASD and 22 well-matched typically developing (TD) children used social perspective to comprehend (Study 1) and produce (Study 2) verbal reference. Social perspective-taking was manipulated by having children collaboratively complete activities with one of two interlocutors such that for a given activity, one interlocutor was Knowledgeable and one was Naïve. Study 1 found no between-group differences for the interpretation of ambiguous references based on social perspective. In Study 2, when producing referring terms, the ASD group made modifications based on listener needs, but this effect was significantly stronger in the TD group. Overall, the findings suggest that high-functioning children with ASD know with which interlocutor they have previously shared a given experience and can take this information into account to steer verbal reference. Nonetheless, they show clear performance limitations in this regard relative to well-matched controls. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1366-1375. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: No one had studied if young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could take into account previous collaboration with particular conversation partners to drive how well they communicate with others. In both their language understanding and spoken language, we found that five to 7-year-olds with ASD were able to consider what they had previously shared with the conversation partner. However, they were impaired when compared to typically developing children in the degree to which they tailored their spoken language for a specific listener.

Direct and Reciprocal Effects among Social Skills, Vocabulary, and Reading Comprehension in First Grade

Social skills and vocabulary are important areas of development involved in early reading achievement, yet little attention has been given to understanding the dynamic associations among them during the elementary years. This study examined the relations among three dimensions of social skills-cooperation, assertion, and self-control-vocabulary and developing reading comprehension (RC) skills in a longitudinal sample of first graders (n = 468). Using Structural Equation Modeling, reciprocal effects were observed between vocabulary and RC as well as direct effects among social skills, vocabulary, and RC after controlling for the influence of problem behaviors. This study highlights the reciprocal nature of students' vocabulary and RC skills as well as provides preliminary evidence suggesting that social skills play a role in developing vocabulary and RC skills, and further, vocabulary and RC skills play a role in social development during middle childhood. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Referential Choices in a Collaborative Storytelling Task: Discourse Stages and Referential Complexity Matter

During a narrative discourse, accessibility of the referents is rarely fixed once and for all. Rather, each referent varies in accessibility as the discourse unfolds, depending on the presence and prominence of the other referents. This leads the speaker to use various referential expressions to refer to the main protagonists of the story at different moments in the narrative. This study relies on a new, collaborative storytelling in sequence task designed to assess how speakers adjust their referential choices when they refer to different characters at specific discourse stages corresponding to the introduction, maintaining, or shift of the character in focus, in increasingly complex referential contexts. Referential complexity of the stories was manipulated through variations in the number of characters (1 vs. 2) and, for stories in which there were two characters, in their ambiguity in gender (different vs. same gender). Data were coded for the type of reference markers as well as the type of reference content (i.e., the extent of the information provided in the referential expression). Results showed that, beyond the expected effects of discourse stages on reference markers (more indefinite markers at the introduction stage, more pronouns at the maintaining stage, and more definite markers at the shift stage), the number of characters and their ambiguity in gender also modulated speakers' referential choices at specific discourse stages, For the maintaining stage, an effect of the number of characters was observed for the use of pronouns and of definite markers, with more pronouns when there was a single character, sometimes replaced by definite expressions when two characters were present in the story. For the shift stage, an effect of gender ambiguity was specifically noted for the reference content with more specific information provided in the referential expression when there was referential ambiguity. Reference content is an aspect of referential marking that is rarely addressed in a narrative context, yet it revealed a quite flexible referential behavior by the speakers.

Mental states and activities in Danish narratives: children with autism and children with language impairment

This study focuses on the relationship between content elements and mental-state language in narratives from twenty-seven children with autism (ASD), twelve children with language impairment (LI), and thirty typically developing children (TD). The groups did not differ on chronological age (10;6-14;0) and non-verbal cognitive skills, and the groups with ASD and TD did not differ on language measures. The children with ASD and LI had fewer content elements of the storyline than the TD children. Compared with the TD children, the children with ASD used fewer subordinate clauses about the characters' thoughts, and preferred talking about mental states as reported speech, especially in the form of direct speech. The children with LI did not differ from the TD children on these measures. The results are discussed in the context of difficulties with socio-cognition in children with ASD and of language difficulties in children with LI.

Pragmatics of language and theory of mind in children with dyslexia with associated language difficulties or nonverbal learning disabilities

The present study aims to find empirical evidence of deficits in linguistic pragmatic skills and theory of mind (ToM) in children with dyslexia with associated language difficulties or nonverbal learning disabilities (NLD), when compared with a group of typically developing (TD) children matched for age and gender. Our results indicate that children with dyslexia perform less well than TD children in most of the tasks measuring pragmatics of language, and in one of the tasks measuring ToM. In contrast, children with NLD generally performed better than the dyslexia group, and performed significantly worse than the TD children only in a metaphors task based on visual stimuli. A discriminant function analysis confirmed the crucial role of the metaphors subtest and the verbal ToM task in distinguishing between the groups. We concluded that, contrary to a generally-held assumption, children with dyslexia and associated language difficulties may be weaker than children with NLD in linguistic pragmatics and ToM, especially when language is crucially involved. The educational and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.