La valutazione delle abilità narrative nei Disturbi dello Spettro Autistico (ASD)

Abstract

The paper aims to explore if mental time travel (i.e., the ability to reconstruct in one's autobiographical memory scenarios of one's past or generate plausible scenarios about one's future), is linked to difficulties in story generation in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Forty-six children with ASD and forty-six with typical cognitive and language development participated in the study. They were asked to generate stories under three conditions: in a first condition they had to generate the beginning (i.e., Foreword); in a second condition they had to generate the plot (i.e., Interweaving); in a third condition they had to generate the end (i.e., Epilogue). The transcripts of these stories were analyzed according to the parameters established by Marini and Carlomagno (2004). To explore the possible difference between groups and conditions these data were analyzed with a series of mixed ANOVAs with repeated measures. These analyses showed the presence of language difficulties in children with ASD that appeared to be particularly evident in certain conditions rather than in others. Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorders; Mental Time Travel; Storytelling; Narrative discourse; Global coherence.