City Research Online

Abstract

Spoken narrative skills are crucial to the social and academic success of young people; however, research indicates that this may be an area of challenge for autistic adolescents. Most previous studies have used narrative elicitation tasks that incorporate visual support, and little is known about how autistic adolescents perform on less structured narrative tasks that more closely approximate everyday instances of communication. Autistic participants aged 11-15 years (N=53) and a non-autistic group (N=57) were asked to recount the events of two 3-4 minute video clips. Narratives were coded for both macrostructure (‘story grammar’) and coherence. Group differences were explored using multiple regression analyses, after controlling for age, non-verbal cognitive ability, and both receptive and expressive language skills. Autistic adolescents produced spoken narratives that were rated as less well-structured and less coherent than those of the non-autistic comparison group. However, controlling for narrative length in exploratory analyses virtually eliminated group differences, suggesting that further research into this relationship is warranted.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). © The Author(s) 2025.
Publisher Keywords:	Autism, adolescents, narrative, storytelling, macrostructure, story grammar, coherence
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Language & Communication Science
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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