Narrative language in autistic and control children: Differences between story retelling and story generation and...

Narrative language, Theory of Mind (ToM), and contextual inferencing are subcomponents of social communication that is a vulnerable area in autism. However, few studies have explored the connection between different aspects of social communication.

This study assessed autistic (n = 14, mean age 7;2 years) and control children's (n = 26, mean age 6;9 years) narrative productions in two conditions (story retelling and story generation), and explored their associations to socio-pragmatic inferencing (contextual inferencing with ToM demands and false belief reasoning).

There were no significant differences between the autistic and control children's narratives, but within-group differences were detected. Autistic children showed similar performance across two different narrative conditions, but control children differed in the amount of expressed story content, mental state language and non-narrator speech between the tasks. Narrative production and socio-pragmatic inferencing were connected, but these skills are related differently in the autistic and control children.

The connections between different components of social communication are most likely multidimensional and complex. However, as there are some associations between the skills, also narrative intervention might support socio-pragmatic inferencing or vice versa. It is important to gain a deeper understanding of the complex nature of social communication and its various aspects to support possible challenges that individuals may face while navigating in a social world.