Everyday narrative skills in autistic adolescents

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.