Narrative Inferential Abilities of Young Autistic Children

Abstract

Inferential narrative comprehension is essential for social interaction and reading comprehension (Cain et al., 2001; Kendeou et al., 2008; McIntyre et al., 2020; van Kleeck, 2008). Research indicates that autistic children exhibit inferential comprehension difficulties compared to their typically developing (TD) peers (Norbury & Bishop, 2002; Nuske & Bavin, 2011; Young et al., 2005). In a study by Norbury and Bishop (2002), 6to 10-year-old autistic children, children with developmental language disorder (DLD), children with pragmatic language impairment (PLI), and typically developing (TD) children responded to six questions (two factual and four inferential). The autistic children performed more poorly on the inferential questions than all other groups. Analysis showed that 70% of the children in the autism group demonstrated poor inferencing skills, compared to 25% in the DLD group. Although inferencing difficulties were observed across clinical groups, an autism diagnosis places children at additional risk. Nuske and Bavin (2011) matched children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; ages 4;6 to 7;11) with TD children (ages 4;2 to 5;4). The children listened to six very short stories (5–7 sentences each), then answered literal and inferential questions. The autistic children showed specific difficulties answering questions that required script inferencing (requiring the ability to incorporate background script knowledge), as opposed to factual questions or propositional inferencing questions (i.e., based on logical relations). In this study, the researchers sought to further describe the inferential narrative comprehension skills of autistic children in their first year of schooling compared to TD peers matched for age and year of schooling. They investigated the impact of structural language ability (i.e., spoken language skills at word and sentence levels as measured on a standardized language test) on the inferential comprehension skills of two subgroups of autistic children and compared to TD children matched for age and year of schooling. The researchers used an ecologically validated task containing a problem-oriented story that is reflective of the school curriculum as opposed to short scripts that had been used in other studies. In addition, they not only considered the children’s performance on factual versus inferential comprehension questions but also specifically looked at causal inference type questions linked to the story characters’ internal response, adopting a fine-grained coding system for analyzing the children’s responses. Researchers asked two questions in this study: