City Research Online

Abstract

Spoken narrative skills are important for adolescents in their everyday lives. Previous research suggests that producing well-structured and coherent narratives may be challenging for autistic young people. Mentalising, also known as ‘advanced Theory of Mind’ (ToM) and ‘Executive Function’ (EF) are two cognitive abilities frequently explored in relation to autism, both of which may be implicated in narrative ability. The present study investigated these relationships in a group of autistic adolescents (N=44) aged 11-15 years and a comparable non-autistic group (N=54) that did not significantly differ on age, sex, non-verbal cognitive ability, or receptive/expressive language skills. Participants were assessed on a video-based spoken narrative task, scored for both overall structure (‘story grammar’) and narrative coherence. A battery of tasks measuring Mentalising and EF (working memory, inhibition, shifting, generativity) was also administered. Relationships between scores on cognitive measures and narrative performance were investigated using hierarchical linear regression analyses. Mentalising scores were found to significantly predict narrative performance across all outcome measures and were a stronger predictor than diagnostic group. Diagnostic group predicted narrative structure (‘story grammar’) scores but not coherence scores. EF scores were not predictive of narrative ability in this sample. Mentalising skills appear to play an important role for both autistic and non-autistic adolescents in the generation of narrative structure and coherence within spoken accounts.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s). Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	Adolescents, Executive Functioning, Social Cognition & Theory of Mind, Language
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics R Medicine > RC Internal medicine
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Language & Communication Science
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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