Effects of predictability on visual and linguistic narrative comprehension in autistic and non-autistic adults

Autistic individuals sometimes show differences from non-autistic individuals when understanding stories, regardless of whether those stories are told through words or pictures. In narrative comprehension, predicting upcoming words or events in a story may facilitate understanding. In studies measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) with non-autistic adults, more predictable words in a linguistic narrative or panels in a visual narrative typically elicit reduced N400 amplitudes compared to less predictable words/panels. However, the predictive processes used by autistic individuals may differ from those used by non-autistic individuals, which could contribute to differences in narrative comprehension. Here, we report two studies examining predictive processing in linguistic and visual narrative comprehension among autistic and non-autistic adults. Autistic adults showed earlier N400 modulations by cloze compared to non-autistic adults in both linguistic and visual modalities, which may reflect a more bottom-up processing style that relies less on active prediction of upcoming words or events.