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

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics
• Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Background:

• Narrative skills are crucial for language acquisition and social-cognitive development.
• Impairments in narrative and social-cognitive skills are noted in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and high-functioning autism (HFA).
• Adolescence is a critical period for assessing the persistence of these skill differences.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate narrative skill deficits in adolescents with DLD and HFA.
• To compare language similarities and differences in personal experience narratives between adolescents with DLD and HFA.
• To evaluate narrative schema compliance, cohesion, and social-cognitive skills in these groups.

Main Methods:

• A narrative of a personal experience was elicited from three groups: 10 adolescents with DLD, 10 with HFA, and 10 typically developing (TD) controls.
• Participants were matched for chronological age.
• Narratives were analyzed for narrative schema adherence (coherence), cohesion (anaphora, connectors), and social-cognitive elements (mental states, vocalizations).

Main Results:

• Adolescents with DLD showed significantly less adherence to the complication step of the narrative schema compared to HFA and TD groups.
• No significant differences were found between the three groups in terms of narrative cohesion.
• Social-cognitive skills, including the use of affective and cognitive mental states, did not differ across the DLD, HFA, and TD adolescent groups.

Conclusions:

• Adolescents with HFA demonstrate intact narrative and social-cognitive skills in personal experience storytelling, as assessed in this study.
• Adolescents with DLD exhibit specific difficulties with the narrative schema (complication step) but not with cohesion or the assessed social-cognitive skills.
• The findings highlight a distinct profile of narrative challenges in DLD during adolescence, differentiating it from HFA.