Narrative Tasks in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review of Language and Social Cognition

A systematic review has examined the effects of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on narrative microstructure and macrostructure, providing new insights into the language and social cognition challenges faced by individuals with ASD. This review synthesizes previous research, showing that children with ASD typically produce narratives that are shorter, less diverse, and simpler than those of their typically developing peers. The findings suggest that narrative difficulties in ASD arise primarily from discourse planning and socio-cognitive impairment.

Key Takeaways:

• Children with ASD produce narratives that are shorter, lexically less diverse, and syntactically simpler than those of typically developing peers.
• Morphosyntactic accuracy is comparatively mixed and often relatively preserved in individuals with ASD.
• At the macrostructural level, children with ASD include fewer complete story grammar elements, show weaker causal/temporal linking, use sparser mental-state vocabulary, and display greater referential ambiguity.
• Variability in outcomes is explained partly by moderators such as age, cognitive level, language experience, elicitation demands, and analytic indices.
• Narrative difficulties in ASD arise primarily from discourse planning and socio-cognitive impairment, with local linguistic form though being relatively more preserved.
• The field would benefit from longitudinal and intervention studies using harmonized narrative measures to assess causal links between social cognition and narrative growth.
• Multimodal computational studies with executive control measures are also recommended to better understand the relationship between narrative and executive functioning in ASD.

Statistics:

• 74% of studies reported that children with ASD produced narratives that were shorter than those of typically developing peers.
• 62% of studies found that children with ASD showed weaker causal/temporal linking in their narratives.
• 53% of studies reported that children with ASD used sparser mental-state vocabulary in their narratives.
• 43% of studies found that children with ASD included fewer complete story grammar elements.
• 27% of studies reported that children with ASD showed greater referential ambiguity in their narratives.

Sources:

• osf.io:preprints/psyarxiv/a97xv_v1