Subject pronoun use by children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD)

Abstract

In the current study, storytelling and story retelling by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were analyzed to explore ambiguous third-person pronoun use in narratives. Twenty-three children diagnosed with ASD aged 6;1 to 14;3 and 17 typically-developing (TD) children aged 5;11 to 14;4 participated in the study. In the retelling task, no significant difference between the groups was found, suggesting that in less challenging tasks, children with ASD produce third-person subject pronouns appropriately. In the storytelling task, children with ASD produced more ambiguous third-person subject pronouns than did the TD children. The findings suggest a model in which children with ASD show deficits in the pragmatic domain of producing narratives.

Keywords:

• autism
• pronouns
• narrative
• production

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Barbara Pearson, Einat Shetreet, Kathleen Corriveau and Lisa Edelson for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and the students who transcribed and coded the language samples. The author thanks Helen Tager-Flusberg for her support and for sharing this valuable data set. This study was supported by the grant number U19 DC 03610 from the NIDCD.

Declaration of Interest: The author reports no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 Average of the five tests of the WJ-III: Letter-Word Identification (1), Passage Comprehension (9), Story Recall (3), Story Recall – Delayed (12) and Oral Comprehension (15).

2 Only 23/24 children with ASD told the “Frog, where are you?” story. One child with ASD participated in the story retelling task but not the storytelling task.

3 Because the children in the ASD group were significantly older than the children in the TD group (t(25)  =  2.22, p  =  0.04), we conducted an additional analysis by excluding the three oldest children with ASD (M  =  8:10 year olds). After excluding the three oldest children, the younger ASD and TD groups did not differ significantly in age (t(22)  =  1.61, p  =  0.12). The results of ambiguous pronoun use were not changed, and no significant difference was found between younger versus older children with ASD (z  =  0.79, p  =  0.22). Thus, all 16 children with ASD were retained for subsequent analyses.

4 No significant difference was found between the two groups (t(11)  =  0.29, p  =  0.78).

5 A mirror finding of this phenomenon is using referential expressions that were more specific than needed (Arnold et al. 2009; Baltaxe, 1977). Arnold et al. (2009) argue that in context of an illustration, children with ASD use pronouns deictically, and when deictic reference is not available, the errors are on the side of overspecification.