An investigation of oral narratives in children with High Functioning Autism: aspects of microstructure and macrostructure

Transcription

1 An investigation of oral narratives in children with High Functioning Autism: aspects of microstructure and macrostructure E L E N I B A L D I M T S I 1, E L E N I P E R I S T E R I 1, & I A N T H I T S I M P L I 1, 2 1 A R I S T O T L E U N I V E R S I T Y O F T H E S S A L O N I K I, 2 U N I V E R S I T Y O F R E A D I N G, UK 13th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, July 2014

2 Aims to compare the narrative performance of children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) to that of typically-developing (TD) children in terms of referential cohesion and global narrative coherence to examine whether lexical and syntactic abilities correlate with cohesion and coherence in narrative discourse

3 HFA Individuals with HFA belong to the autism spectrum with no learning disability (Frith, 2004) Basic language functioning (phonology, syntax) is age-appropriate while higher level linguistic abilities (e.g. use of language in context, pragmatic inferencing, intentionality) are inappropriate (Joliffe & Baron-Cohen, 2000; Tager- Flusberg, Paul & Lord, 2005) Verbal and non-verbal IQ 85

4 Narratives as linguistic and cognitive markers of development Linguistic development: reference, coordination, subordination, temporal anchoring Cognitive (and pragmatic) development: constructing the episode(s) and building a mental model of the narrative (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Bower & Morrow, 1990; Arnold, Benetto &Diehl, 2008) Central coherence - Theory of Mind

5 A. Referential cohesion The development of narrative ability is related to the development of character reference: Introduction, Maintenance, Shift (Reintroduction) (Hickman et al 1995; 1996; Hickman & Hendriks, 1999)

6 Reference use in autism Underspecification: Children with autism overused pronouns and zero-pronouns where full DPs should have been used in shift contexts ((Norbury & Bishop, 2003; Norbury et al., 2013;Tager- Flusberg, 1995) Overspecification: children with autism overused full DPs expressions instead of pronouns in maintenance (Baltaxe, 1977; Colle, Baron- Cohen, Wheelwright & Van der Lely, 2008; Arnold et al., 2009) Why? A. Memory problems (maintaining activation in cases of overload) B. Taking the listener s perspective into account (ToM)

7 B. Global narrative coherence holistic organization of discourse, use of causal explanatory frameworks to integrate narrated events in meaningful ways, and referential cohesion (Hogan-Brown, Losh, Martin, &. Mueffelmann, 2013 ) Individuals with autism tend to use fewer evaluatives (i.e. characters thoughts & emotions), fewer causal networks and more irrelevant, inappropriate utterances while narrating a story (Norbury et al., 2013; Diehl et al., 2006)

8 I. The study - Participants 20 Greek-speaking children diagnosed with HFA (1 girl, age range: 7;0-12;6, Mean: 9;4 yrs., SD: 1.8) Diagnostic criteria: Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R; Lord, Rutter, & Le Couteur, 1994) clinical assessment of the child s social-adaptive functioning by a child psychiatrist 20 typically-developing (TD) Greek-speaking children (1 girl, age range: 7;0-12;5, Mean: 9;4 yrs., SD: 1.78)

9 II. The study Methodology Screening tasks - Morpho-Syntactic Comprehension (Diagnostic Verbal IQ (DVIQ); Stavrakaki & Tsimpli, 1999) Greek Expressive Vocabulary task (Vogindroukas, Protopapas, & Sideridis, 2009; adaptation from Renfrew Word Finding test, 1995).

10 Results (WISC-III, DVIQ, Vocabulary), Means (SD) Groups WISC (general IQ index) DVIQ score Expressive Vocabulary (max. score: 50) TD control Children Mean verbal IQ: (16.4) Mean performance IQ: (15.4) Children with HFA *Mean verbal IQ: (17.3) **Mean performance IQ: (15.4) 17.1 (3.9) 45.1 (3.7) MEVA: 11; (3.8) 42.4 (5.0) MEVA: 10;7 *verbal IQ index: 9 children with HFA scored sign. lower (p<.05) than the mean of the control children **performance IQ index: 7 children with HFA scored sign. lower (p<.05) than the mean of the control children (Singlims_ES software; Crawford et al., 2003)

11 II. The story Wordless storybook: Harry the dirty dog (Zion, 1956) Telling: all pictures were presented initially and then page by page in a book form; the experimenter was watching Retelling: the child listens to the story through headphones; the experimenter was sitting opposite the child without looking at the book; the child had to retell the story looking at the pictures again

12 Harry the dirty dog picture-story

13 II. a.microstructure Lexical Diversity of Internal State terms (emotions, beliefs, attitudes, expressed through different categories) Syntactic Complexity Index (Hunt, 1970): No of subordinated sentences for every c-unit

14 II.b. Macrostructure -No of Episodes -Setting -Closing events: statements that indicate goal attainment/ failure of the protagonists actions -Accuracy: theme & point of the story -Causal connectivity: the average number of connections between propositions Causal Networks (Trabasso & Sperry, 1985) In text cause-and-effect connections between events or linguistic units create a network of information. This network identifies the causal chain, the events that create the gist of the story (Trabasso & Sperry, 1985).

15 Causal Networks (Trabasso & Sperry, 1985) Causal connections in the story Harry the dirty dog between 5 events: 1.Harry was a white dog with black spots 2. who liked everything, except getting a (2) bath. 3. So one day when he heard the water running in the tab, (3) 4.he took the scrubbing brush and buried it in the backyard 5.Then he ran away from home.

16 Results

17 I. Frequencies of use of referential forms in telling and retelling in Maintenance ,95 Telling 100 Retelling Lex. NPs ,44 84,74 Lex. DPs Pronoun 50 Pronouns , ,89 13, , TD children HFA children 0 TD children HFA children - Pronouns > Lex. DPs in both telling and retelling (p<.05) for both groups - No significant between-group differences in either telling or retelling

18 I. Frequencies of use of referential forms in telling and retelling in Reintroduction 100 Telling 100 Retelling Lex. DPs Lex. DPs ,83 42,4 Pronouns ,54 47,78 43,33 35,55 Pronouns , TD children HFA children 0 TD children HFA children - Pronouns > Lex. DPs in telling only (p<.05) for both groups - Non significant between-group differences in both modes - Lex. DPs sign. higher in retelling (p<.010) for both groups (retelling effect)

19 II. Narrative length and Lexical Diversity of IST Telling Retelling - TD children: higher rates for both C-units and lexical diversity in retelling (p<.005) - Children with HFA: higher rates for lexical diversity in retelling (p=.013) - Significant between-group differences in both C-units and Lexical Diversity in Retelling (TD children > children with HFA)

20 III. Microstructure: Syntactic Complexity Index 2 1,8 1,6 1,4 1,2 1,29 Syntactic Complexity Index Telling 1,23 Syntactic Complexity Index 2 1,8 1,6 1,4 1,2 1,49 Syntactic Complexity Index Retelling 1,41 Syntactic Complexity Index 1 1 0,8 0,8 0,6 0,6 0,4 0,4 0,2 0,2 0 TD children HFA children 0 TD children HFA children - TD children: higher Syntactic Complexity Index in Retelling (p=.013) - n.s. between-group differences

21 IV. Macrostructure measures Telling Retelling - TD children: narrative mode effect; higher rates for Settings in Retelling (p=.025) - Children with HFA: narrative mode effect; higher rates for No of Episodes (p=.034) and No of Peripheral Events (p=.046) in Retelling. - Telling: TD > children with HFA in Causal Connectivity, Accuracy, No of Episodes and Peripheral Events - Retelling: TD > children with HFA in all 5 categories

22 Syntactic Complexity Index and causal connectivity HFA children Syntactic Comprehension (DVIQ) was positively correlated with the Syntactic Complexity index in retelling (F(1, 19)=4.003, p=.051, r=.182). Expressive Vocab was positively correlated with Causal connectivity in the telling condition (F(1, 19)=4.113, p=.058, r=.186).

23 Summary Referential Cohesion: no significant between-group differences in the use of appropriate referential forms per referential function Microstructure: children with HFA produced shorter narratives and less lexical diversity in the use of internal state terms Macrostructure: children with HFA had less structured causal networks than the TD children-->story structure and coherence were problematic for the children with autism Narrative mode effects: retelling had more marked effects on TD children than children with HFA in terms of number of C-units, Syntactic Complexity and Settings as part of causal networks

24 Remaining questions To what extent can differences in language ability in children with HFA vs. TD account for problems in encoding macrostructure?

25 Many thanks to the children participating in the study and their parents And thank you for your attention!

26 Selected References American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing. Arnold, J.E., Bennetto, L.,& Diehl, J.J.(2009).Reference production in young speakers with and without autism: Effects of discourse status and processing constraints. Cognition, 110, Baltaxe, C.A.M.,&D Angiola, N.(1992). Cohesion in the discourse interaction of autistic, specifically language-impaired, and normal children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders,22, Bamberg,M.,&Damrad Frye,R.(1991).On the ability to provide evaluative comments: Further explorations of children s narrative competencies. Journal of Child Language,18, Baron-Cohen, S.(1995).Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge, UK: The MIT Press. Diehl, J. J., Bennetto, L., & Young, E. (2006). Story recall and narrative coherence of high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 34(1),

27 Selected References (ctd.) Hunt, K. W. (1970). Recent measures in syntactic development. In M. Lester (ed.) Reading in applied transformational grammar ( ). Nueva York: Holt, Rinehart and Wiston. Frith, U. (2003). Autism: Explaining the enigma. Oxford: Blackwell. Joliffe, T., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2000). Linguistic processing in high-functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome: Can global coherence be achieved? A further test of central coherence theory. Psychological Medicine, 30, Norbury, C.F., Gemmel,T., &Paul, R.(2013). Pragmatic abilities in narrative production: across-disorder comparison. Journal of Child Language Advance online publication. Stavrakaki, S. & Τsimpli, I. M. (2000). Diagnostic verbal IQ test for school and preschool children: Standardization, statistical analysis, and psychometric properties. Proceedings of the 8 th conference of the Panhellenic Association of Speech and Language Therapists (pp ). Athens: Ellinika Grammata. Schuh, J. M., & Eigsti, I. M. (2012).Working Memory, Language Skills, and Autism Symptomatology. Behavioral Sciences, 2 (4), Trabasso, T., & Sperry, L. L. (1985). Causal relatedness and importance of story events. Journal of Memory and Language, 24, Vogindroukas, I., Protopapas, A. X., & Sideridis, G. (2009). Greek version of the Word Finding Vocabulary Test (Renfrew, 1995). Athens: Glauki.

28 Peripheral events of the story 1.Harry was a white dog with black spots 2. who liked everything, except getting a bath. Setting 1st. Harry is avoiding the bath 2nd. Harry s adventure w/ sub- episodes 3rd. Harry s trouble back home 4rth. Finding the brush 5fth. Towards the bath tub 6th. Taking a bath 7th. Bach home No of episodes 1. Harry s bath was the soapiest one he d ever had. It worked like magic. As soon as the children started to scrub, they began shouting, Mummy! Daddy! Closing Look! Come quick! It s Harry! It s Harry! It s Harry! they cried. events 2. Harry wagged his tail and was very, very happy. 3. It was wonderful to be home

29 Accuracy Harry the dirty dog story is that it is about a white dog with black spots who loves everything, except baths. So one day before bath time, Harry runs away. He plays outside all day long, digging and sliding in everything from garden soil to pavement tar. By the time he returns home, Harry is so dirty he looks like a black dog with white spots. His family doesn't even recognize him! THEME Of all things, Harry has to ask for a bath and when finally gets it then his family recognizes him. POINT