Can strong language skills offset autism's storytelling difficulties?
Autistic children with strong language skills matched typical peers on some sentence measures and on words for thoughts and feelings, but both autistic groups told stories with much weaker overall structure.
Source
Syntactic and Story Structure Complexity in the Narratives of High- and Low-Language Ability Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Three-group comparison of story retellings (ENNI picture story) by autistic children with high vs low language ability and age-matched typically developing children, coded for syntax, internal-state terms and story grammar.
- N
- N=45 · 30 autistic boys (16 high-language, 14 low-language) plus 15 typically developing children.
- Population
- Greek-speaking children aged roughly 6.1 to 12.4 with autism and normal non-verbal IQ, and age-matched typically developing peers
- Outcome
- Syntactic complexity, types of subordinate clauses, theory-of-mind-related internal state terms, and story structure complexity (maximum 15 points)
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What they did
30 Greek-speaking autistic boys with normal non-verbal IQ were split by verbal IQ and expressive vocabulary into high- and low-language groups and compared with 15 age-matched typically developing children. Each child listened to a picture story and retold it. Retellings were coded for sentence complexity, types of subordinate clauses (verb complements versus modifying adverbial and relative clauses), words for characters' thoughts and emotions, and how completely the goal-attempt-outcome structure of each episode was reproduced.
What they found
The low-language autistic group used fewer complex sentences and fewer complement clauses, especially the tense-marked 'that' types, and fewer thought-and-emotion words than the other two groups. The high-language group resembled typical children on these measures. However, both autistic groups used fewer modifier clauses and scored much lower on story structure than typical children, with no advantage for high language ability. Story structure scores correlated with use of modifier clauses.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Groups were small, all autistic participants were boys, and results come from a single retelling of one story in Greek, so generalisation to other languages, tasks or girls is uncertain. Group differences were tested mainly with chi-square tests on pooled counts, which treat clauses rather than children as independent and can overstate significance. Being observational, the study cannot show that language ability causes the differences; the authors note low working memory or uneven IQ profiles might contribute.
Key terms
- Microstructure
- Sentence-level features of a narrative such as vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity.
- Macrostructure
- Story-level organisation, such as setting, goals, attempts, outcomes and characters' mental states.
- Complement clause
- A subordinate clause required by a verb, e.g. 'saw that the plane fell'.
- Modifier clause
- An optional adverbial or relative clause that adds temporal, causal or descriptive information and links events.
- Internal state terms
- Words describing characters' emotions, thoughts or perceptions; theory-of-mind-related ones refer to feelings and mental states.
- Pragmatics
- The use of language in context, including organising discourse coherently for a listener.
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Quiz yourself
Which measure showed no benefit of high language ability in autism?
Common questions
Why distinguish complement from modifier clauses?
Complement clauses mainly depend on grammatical knowledge, while modifier clauses also depend on pragmatic skill in linking events, so comparing them separates language from pragmatics.
Did good language skills help at all?
Yes, for sentence complexity, complement clauses and words for thoughts and feelings, but not for modifier clauses or overall story structure.
What does this imply about autism?
It suggests a pragmatic difficulty in organising stories that persists even when formal language skills are strong.
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