scholarly journals Focus on the Narrative Skills of Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder and High Functioning Autism

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucie Broc ◽  
Elise Brassart ◽  
Anne Bragard ◽  
Thierry Olive ◽  
Marie-Anne Schelstraete
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
High Functioning Autism ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
High Functioning ◽  
Narrative Skills

Purpose: Narratives of personal experiences emerge early in language acquisition and are particularly commonly experienced in children’s daily lives. To produce these stories, children need to develop narrative, linguistic, and social-cognitive skills. Research has shown that these skills are impaired in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and high functioning autism (HFA).Aim: This study aimed to determine whether narrative skills are still impaired in adolescence and to highlight the language similarities and differences between teenagers with DLD and HFA in the production of a narrative of a personal experience.Method: Ten teenagers with DLD, 10 teenagers with HFA and 10 typically developing (TD) teenagers, matched on chronological age, told a narrative of a personal experience. These stories were analyzed to evaluate narrative skills through coherence (respect of the narrative schema) and cohesion (anaphora and connectors) and social-cognitive skills (affective and cognitive mental states of the characters, and arbitrary vocalizations such as voice noises).Results: Teenagers with DLD were less compliant with the complication step in the narrative schema than teenagers with HFA or TD. No difference was observed between the three groups of teenagers in terms of cohesion or regarding the positive and negative social-cognitive skills used in narratives.Conclusion: When producing a narrative of a personal experience, HFA teens do not have difficulties neither with narrative skills and with social-cognitive skills assessed in this paper. In DLD the profile of the teens is not the same: They do not have difficulties with social-cognitive skills and with a part of narrative skills (cohesion), and they have difficulties with the narrative schema.

scholarly journals Oral Narrative Intervention by Tele-Practice in a Case with Developmental Language Disorder

Children ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 1052
Author(s):  
Irina Iuliu ◽  
Verónica Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Data Exchange ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Oral Narrative ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Narrative Skills ◽  
Oral Retelling ◽  
Language Data

Background: A narrative requires the integration and management of linguistic and cognitive skills. It has been observed that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties in narrating stories. This research proposes an intervention in a case of a child 9 years and 2 months old with DLD, with the aim of improving his oral narrative skills through a retelling task via telepractice. Methods: In the evaluation, standardized tests have been used and a ‘remembering a story’ task, with a story titled The Lost Backpack, elaborated by one of the authors. Narratives were elicited in two sessions, and were transcribed, coded, and analysed using the Child Language Data Exchange System CHILDES Project tool. The participant received a total of 10 sessions through the Skype platform, which included intervention-addressed explicit instruction about the narrative structure and the use of discourse markers to improve cohesion in story retelling. Results: Significant changes were observed in the retelling of the story at microstructure and macrostructure levels: an increase of the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), Types and Tokens, specific vocabulary, discourse markers and the recall of events. Conclusions: These results demonstrate the effectiveness of intervention in narrative skills through the oral retelling of a story with visual support via tele-practice.

scholarly journals The systemizing quotient: an investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high–functioning autism, and normal sex differences

2003 ◽  
Vol 358 (1430) ◽  
pp. 361-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Baron-Cohen ◽  
Jennifer Richler ◽  
Dheraj Bisarya ◽  
Nhishanth Gurunathan ◽  
Sally Wheelwright
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
General Population ◽  
Asperger Syndrome ◽  
High Functioning Autism ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Adult Males ◽  
High Functioning ◽  
Major Dimension ◽  
Empathy Quotient

Systemizing is the drive to analyse systems or construct systems. A recent model of psychological sex differences suggests that this is a major dimension in which the sexes differ, with males being more drawn to systemize than females. Currently, there are no self–report measures to assess this important dimension. A second major dimension of sex differences is empathizing (the drive to identify mental states and respond to these with an appropriate emotion). Previous studies find females score higher on empathy measures. We report a new self–report questionnaire, the Systemizing Quotient (SQ), for use with adults of normal intelligence. It contains 40 systemizing items and 20 control items. On each systemizing item, a person can score 2, 1 or 0, so the SQ has a maximum score of 80 and a minimum of zero. In Study 1, we measured the SQ of n = 278 adults (114 males, 164 females) from a general population, to test for predicted sex differences (male superiority) in systemizing. All subjects were also given the Empathy Quotient (EQ) to test if previous reports of female superiority would be replicated. In Study 2 we employed the SQ and the EQ with n = 47 adults (33 males, 14 females) with Asperger syndrome (AS) or high–functioning autism (HFA), who are predicted to be either normal or superior at systemizing, but impaired at empathizing. Their scores were compared with n = 47 matched adults from the general population in Study 1. In Study 1, as predicted, normal adult males scored significantly higher than females on the SQ and significantly lower on the EQ. In Study 2, again as predicted, adults with AS/HFA scored significantly higher on the SQ than matched controls, and significantly lower on the EQ than matched controls. The SQ reveals both a sex difference in systemizing in the general population and an unusually strong drive to systemize in AS/HFA. These results are discussed in relation to two linked theories: the ‘empathizing–systemizing’ (E–S) theory of sex differences and the extreme male brain (EMB) theory of autism.

Syntactic abilities and verbal memory in monolingual and bilingual children with High Functioning Autism (HFA)

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Meir ◽  
Rama Novogrodsky
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Verbal Memory ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
High Functioning Autism ◽  
Digit Span ◽  
Verbal Working Memory ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
High Functioning ◽  
Sentence Repetition

The aim of the current study was two-fold. First, it evaluated the influence of bilingualism on syntactic abilities and verbal memory of children with High Functioning Autism (HFA). Second, it explored the relationship between syntactic abilities and verbal memory of children with HFA and typical language development (TLD). Eighty-six monolingual Hebrew-speaking and bilingual Russian–Hebrew speaking children aged 4;6–9;2 years participated: 28 with HFA (14 monolingual and 14 bilingual) and 58 with TLD (28 monolingual and 30 bilingual). Syntactic abilities were assessed using Sentence Repetition tasks (bilingual children were tested in both languages). Verbal memory was evaluated using Forward Digit Span for verbal short-term memory and Backward Digit Span for verbal working memory. As a group, children with HFA scored lower than their TLD peers on measures of syntactic abilities and verbal memory. However, some children with HFA, monolingual and bilingual, showed intact syntactic abilities, while others scored at-risk for Language Disorder (LD). Importantly, syntactic abilities in children with HFA were not associated with their verbal memory skills. Furthermore, no differences in verbal memory were found between children with HFA who were at-risk for LD and children with no risk. Bilingualism did not influence Sentence Repetition scores when vocabulary was controlled for, and it did not affect verbal memory scores. The study demonstrated that (1) syntactic difficulties in children with HFA are not attributable to deficient verbal memory; moreover (2), regardless of languages status, children with HFA at-risk for LD exhibit impaired syntax similarly to those reported in the literature for children with Developmental Language Disorder. Finally, the findings show that bilingualism affects children with TLD and HFA similarly, demonstrating that bilingualism does not impede language and cognitive development in children with HFA.

The Ability of Five Children With Developmental Language Disorder to Describe Mental States in Stories

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Brinton ◽  
Martin Fujiki ◽  
Naomi Asai
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Emotion Words ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Story Generation ◽  
Story Content ◽  
Internal States ◽  
Wordless Picture Books ◽  
Emotional Knowledge

This study described the ability of five children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to relate the mental states of story characters in two conditions: spontaneous story generation and in response to direct questions. Children spontaneously generated stories from wordless picture books. Subsequently, they were prompted, “What was (character) thinking” and “How does (character) feel?” for each story illustration. For each condition, the number of internal responses, internal plans, and emotion words that children produced were identified and analyzed for accuracy according to the pictured story content. Descriptions of story characters’ internal states, especially emotions, increased in response to prompts, but the accuracy of those descriptions decreased. In response to the prompts, children frequently conveyed emotion words that did not reflect the pictured story content accurately. The ability to relate internal states in story generation was constrained not only by linguistic deficits but also by limited social and emotional knowledge.

scholarly journals The Croatian adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives*

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 37-44
Author(s):  
Gordana Hržica ◽  
Jelena Kuvač Kraljević
Keyword(s):  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Language Disorders ◽  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Narrative Skills ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Age Range

This paper presents the Croatian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), outlines its development and describes the research that has used it to assess narrative skills in monolingual and bilingual speakers. The Croatian version of MAIN has so far been used in three research projects and results have been presented in five peer-reviewed articles (published or in press) covering a total of 175 children in the age range from 5;0 to 9;0 (20 with developmental language disorder) and 60 adults, age range from 22 to 76. The accumulated results indicate that MAIN can differentiate narrative skills of speakers in distinct age groups and can distinguish children with language disorders form children with typical language development.

Interoception and social cognition in chronic low back pain: a common inference disturbance? An exploratory study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florent El Grabli ◽  
François Quesque ◽  
Céline Borg ◽  
Michael Witthöft ◽  
George A Michael ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Low Back Pain ◽  
Back Pain ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Chronic Low Back Pain ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Heart Beat ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Interoceptive Accuracy

Aim: Lower interoceptive abilities are a characteristic of chronic pain conditions. Social support plays an important role in chronic low back pain (cLBP) but social cognitive skills have rarely been investigated. This study aimed to characterize interoceptive and social cognitive abilities in cLBP and to study the relationship between both domains that have been brought closer together by brain predictive coding models. Materials & methods: Twenty-eight patients with cLBP and 74 matched controls were included. Interoceptive accuracy (Heart Beat Perception Task), sensibility/awareness (Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness) and mental-states inference abilities (Mini-Social Cognition and Emotional Assessment) were assessed. Results: cLBP Patients had lower interoceptive accuracy and mentalizing performance. Conclusion: Less efficient interoceptive accuracy and mentalizing abilities were found in cLBP patients without correlation between these performances.

Mind Reading in Films Task to Assess Social Cognitive Deficits in Autism Spectrum Conditions

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-100
Author(s):  
Soraya TAHAZADEH ◽  
Usha BARAHMAND ◽  
Fereshteh YAGHOOTI ◽  
Mohamad Ali NAZARI
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
High Functioning Autism ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Diagnostic Value ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Autism Spectrum Conditions ◽  
Mind Reading ◽  
Eyes Task

"Background and Objectives. Various tasks with a variety of stimuli have been devised to measure aspects of theory of mind. In the present study, with due consideration of Iranian culture, we introduce a sensitive video-based test, called Mind Reading in Films Task (Films Task), for the evaluation of complex emotions and mental states. This new social ecological task for mindreading comprises several short film scenes, some measuring cognitive theory of mind and some measuring affective theory of mind. Method. This study included two experiments. In experiment 1, the validity of the newly devised Films Task was investigated by comparing the responses of 342 students to the Films Task and to the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (Eyes Test). In experiment 2, the predictive power and sensitivity of the Films Task was assessed. Twenty adults with high functioning autism spectrum conditions (ASC) were compared with 20 matched healthy controls in terms of their responses to the Eyes Task, Films Task and Empathy Quotient questionnaire. The ROC curve was used to determine the best cut-off point and the diagnostic value. Results. Our findings substantiate the discriminative capacity of the Films Task to distinguish individuals with autism spectrum conditions from their healthy non-clinical counterparts. Limitations: Intelligence and comorbid psychiatric conditions were not controlled, limiting the utility of the measure. Conclusions. Results imply the potential utility of the Films Task as a viable alternative to the Eyes Task in measuring individual differences in social cognitive ability in the general population."

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