Analysis of Noun Phrase Ambiguity in Narratives Reveals Differences in Referential Establishment But Not Cohesion for Older Autistic Children.

Researchers studied how autistic and non-autistic children tell stories. They found that autistic children struggle more with introducing story characters clearly (like starting with 'she' instead of explaining who 'she' is), but once characters are introduced, they're just as good at keeping the story clear. This suggests autistic children have difficulty thinking about what their listener already knows, but their basic storytelling skills are similar to other children.

This study examined how 33 children aged 10-17 (17 autistic, 16 non-autistic) tell stories after watching animated videos. Researchers analyzed how children referred to characters in their narratives, distinguishing between ambiguous character introduction (e.g., starting with 'she' instead of 'a girl') and ambiguous cohesion (unclear references after characters are established). Results showed autistic children produced significantly more ambiguous character introductions than non-autistic peers, but showed similar rates of ambiguous cohesion once characters were established. This suggests autistic children have difficulty applying social pragmatic principles (considering what listeners know) but maintain comparable linguistic pragmatic skills (context-independent language rules).

Findings suggest narrative interventions should specifically target character introduction skills and perspective-taking abilities. Speech-language pathologists can focus on teaching autistic children to consider listener knowledge when establishing story characters, while building on their existing cohesive language strengths.

Small sample size (33 participants total). Groups were matched on age, language, and IQ but other potentially relevant factors not reported. Single narrative task may not generalize to other communication contexts. Study type not specified in metadata.

Stories told by autistic narrators often contain relatively frequent use of ambiguous references. However, it remains unclear whether this ambiguity is driven by ambiguous character establishment (e.g., "Once upon a time, she/the girl…") and/or ambiguous cohesion (e.g., "Two girls lived in a castle. She/The girl…"). In this study, we directly compared rates of each type of ambiguity within and between narratives told by autistic and non-autistic children, to determine which type of ambiguity is relatively more common in narratives told by autistic children.

Thirty-three 10- to 17-year-old autistic participants (= 17) and non-autistic peers (= 16), who were not statistically different in age, standardized language scores, and IQ scores (> .8 for all), watched two short animated videos alone and then described the videos' events to two listeners who were openly unfamiliar with the videos. We transcribed video recordings of narratives and coded all referential noun phrases (NPs) as either clear or ambiguous. We further categorized ambiguous NPs as either ineffective introduction or ineffective cohesion. Autistic children produced significantly higher rates of ambiguous establishment than non-autistic peers, whereas between-group comparisons' rates of ambiguous cohesion were not statistically significant.

Older children on the autism spectrum show differences in the way they introduce characters, selecting NP types that are only appropriate when their listener is already familiar with the referent. In contrast, once they have introduced characters, they show cohesive skills that are comparable to those of non-autistic peers. Findings support theories arguing that autistic children show differences in their application of social pragmatic principles (listener/context-specific pragmatic rules), whereas their use of linguistic pragmatics (context-independent rules) is similar to that of non-autistic peers.