Brief Report-Written Personal Narratives of Autistic and Non-autistic Women: A Linguistic Analysis

Narrative research in autism has consistently revealed linguistic differences between autistic and non-autistic individuals. However, existing studies predominantly focus on male samples, overlooking the communicative profiles of autistic women. Recent studies suggest that autistic women exhibit distinct socio-communicative characteristics compared to both autistic men and non-autistic women. Given the important role of written communication in academic and professional settings and the reported preference for written expression among autistic adults, this study investigates the linguistic features of written narratives produced by autistic and non-autistic women.

Fifteen autistic and fifteen non-autistic women each wrote four episodic memories based on emotion cue words (pride, sadness, happiness, anger). These narratives were systematically analyzed across three linguistic dimensions: microstructure (narrative length, lexical variability, use of unique and low-frequency words), macrostructure (use of causal connectives) and internal state language (emotion, cognition, perception, modality and evaluation words).

Autistic women produced significantly longer narratives with higher lexical variability, more unique and low-frequency words than non-autistic women, particularly in narratives involving negative emotions. They also used fewer explicit causal connectives and showed a reduced use of cognition words but included more perception words compared to non-autistic women. No group differences were observed for emotion, modality and evaluation words.

This exploratory study contributes to a better characterization of the linguistic profile of autistic women in a written task. The results suggest a unique writing profile, highlighting strengths in lexical variability and vocabulary, and challenges in the expression of explicit causal relations and internal state language.