Abstract
Purpose: Narratives of personal experiences emerge early in language acquisition and are particularly commonly experienced in children’s daily lives. To produce these stories, children need to develop narrative, linguistic, and social-cognitive skills. Research has shown that these skills are impaired in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and high functioning autism (HFA).Aim: This study aimed to determine whether narrative skills are still impaired in adolescence and to highlight the language similarities and differences between teenagers with DLD and HFA in the production of a narrative of a personal experience.Method: Ten teenagers with DLD, 10 teenagers with HFA and 10 typically developing (TD) teenagers, matched on chronological age, told a narrative of a personal experience. These stories were analyzed to evaluate narrative skills through coherence (respect of the narrative schema) and cohesion (anaphora and connectors) and social-cognitive skills (affective and cognitive mental states of the characters, and arbitrary vocalizations such as voice noises).Results: Teenagers with DLD were less compliant with the complication step in the narrative schema than teenagers with HFA or TD. No difference was observed between the three groups of teenagers in terms of cohesion or regarding the positive and negative social-cognitive skills used in narratives.Conclusion: When producing a narrative of a personal experience, HFA teens do not have difficulties neither with narrative skills and with social-cognitive skills assessed in this paper. In DLD the profile of the teens is not the same: They do not have difficulties with social-cognitive skills and with a part of narrative skills (cohesion), and they have difficulties with the narrative schema.
Highlights
Developmental language disorder (DLD) and high functioning autism (HFA) are classified as neurodevelopmental disorders in the 10th International Classification of Diseases (CIM10)
Studies conducted in childhood have shown that in children with DLD have significant language difficulties that result in poor narrative performance (Botting and Conti-Ramsden, 2004; Leonard, 2014) and that children with HFA encounter difficulties in the social use of language (Adams, 2005), which affect their narrative skills (Goldman, 2008)
It is important to study the similarities and specificities in oral language skills of teenagers with DLD or HFA when they tell a narrative of a personal experience
Summary
Developmental language disorder (DLD) and high functioning autism (HFA) are classified as neurodevelopmental disorders in the 10th International Classification of Diseases (CIM10). Children with DLD and HFA experience difficulties with oral language, when they tell a narrative of a personal story (Norbury and Bishop, 2003). It is important to study the similarities and specificities in oral language skills of teenagers with DLD or HFA when they tell a narrative of a personal experience. Using narratives of personal experiences allows one to measure the narrative skills at the linguistic and social-cognitive levels, as involved in typical language development (de Weck and Rosat, 2003; Norbury and Bishop, 2003) or in neurodevelopmental disorders such as DLD (McCabe et al, 2008) and HFA (Botting, 2002)
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