Narrating strange stories: structural language impairments and internal state reference in ASD

The ability to narrate a story involves integrating quite a complex web of information: who did what to whom and why? In recounting the events of a story, reference to the mental states of characters is often a good way of retelling the story concisely and coherently for an audience. However, this requires both an awareness of mental states, as well a language rich enough to express them. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are often characterised as having a specific impairment in their ability to represent other people’s mental states i.e. a ‘theory of mind’-deficit (Baron-Cohen 1997). Recent studies have, however, highlighted that problems associated with social interaction and empathy for individuals with autism are in large part associated with more general deficits and developmental delays in acquiring age-appropriate linguistic abilities – with early language ability being one of the primary predictors of how well they will be able to socially interact with others later in life (Fein et al. 2013). A means of examining this link between language and social skills is through narrative elicitation tasks in which participants are presented with a short story and asked to re-tell it in their own words while being recorded on a microphone (Norbury & Bishop 2009). By subsequently transcribing each participants re-telling, it is possible to identify linguistic markers of their retelling which point to expressive-receptive language impairments, such as ungrammatical sentence structures and formulation errors. However, it is also possible to develop socio-cognitive indices of the children’s ability to retell a story, such as their ability to recall events from the story and retell it coherently with emphasis on characters’ intentions e.g. verbs and adverbs signifying beliefs and emotions (i.e. “He is afraid that people will recognize him in his costume”). In an exploratory study using an experiment in narrative elicitation for children with ASD (n=17), I found that the children’s use of internal-state language (i.e. references to beliefs, thoughts and desires) was significantly associated with their ability to use syntactically more complex sentential complements (e.g. that-clauses) – that is, the more linguistically skilled children were able to produce narrative retellings with significantly more (and more complex) references to characters’ emotions and beliefs. The results and limitations of this study are discussed, as well as their possible consequences for a theory of mentalization in autism.