Can Narrative Skills Improve in Autism Spectrum Disorder? A Preliminary Study with Verbally Fluent Adolescents Receiving the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment

• DOI: 10.1007/s10936-023-09945-4
• Publication Date: 2023-05-08T12:02:45Z
• Authors: Dize Hilviu; Federico Frau; Francesca M. Bosco; Andrea Marini; Ilaria Gabbatore
• Keywords: Language Tests; Cognition; Adolescence; Autism spectrum disorder; Narrative skills; Pragmatic training; Verbally fluent ASD; Adolescent; Autism Spectrum Disorder; 4. Education; Humans; Language Development Disorders; Article; 3. Good health; Language

AbstractAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting social and communicative skills, including narrative ability, namely the description of real-life or fictive accounts of temporally and causally related events. With this study, we aimed to determine whether a communicative-pragmatic training, i.e., the version for adolescents of the Cognitive-Pragmatic Treatment, is effective in improving the narrative skills of 16 verbally fluent adolescents with ASD. We used a multilevel approach to assess pre- and post-training narrative production skills. Discourse analysis focused on micro- (i.e., mean length of utterance, complete sentences, omissions of morphosyntactic information) and macrolinguistic measures (i.e., cohesion, coherence errors, lexical informativeness). Results revealed a significant improvement in mean length of utterance and complete sentences and a decrease in cohesion errors. No significant change was found in the other narrative measures investigated. Our findings suggest that a pragmatically oriented training may be useful in improving grammatical efficiency in narrative production.