Autism 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.
Can Narrative Skills Improve in Autism Spectrum Disorder? A Preliminary Study with Verbally Fluent Adolescents Receiving the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment
Hilviu D.First
;Bosco F. M.
;Marini A.
;Gabbatore I.Last
2023-01-01
Abstract
Autism 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.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
---|---|---|---|
2023_Hilviu et al._Narrative improvement in ASD ado_JOPR.pdf
Accesso aperto
Descrizione: Hilviu et al., 2023_JOPR_Open Access
Tipo di file:
PDF EDITORIALE
Dimensione
939.93 kB
Formato
Adobe PDF
|
939.93 kB | Adobe PDF | Visualizza/Apri |
I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.