Storytelling and Special Interests: Microstructure in the Fictional and Personal Narratives of Autistic Adults

• Author / Creator

  Daley, Natasha

• Background and objectives: Past research has found that autistic individuals have pragmatic and
  morphosyntactic deficits in narrative language; however, the majority of these studies use fictional
  narrative prompts and are on children, not older autistic individuals. Furthermore, very few use interestbased prompts. Research has shown that incorporating autistic individuals’ special interests into activities
  can increase their academic success, socialization, and mental health. Thus, this study investigates
  whether using a special interest-based prompt improves narrative language performance in autistic adults
  as compared to non-autistic adults.
  Methods: There were 43 adult participants, including 23 self-identified autistic adults, who each narrated
  both a fictional story and an interest-based personal story. Participants also completed an IQ screener, a
  questionnaire which measures autistic traits, and a background questionnaire which included questions
  on diagnosis, language proficiency, and frequency of reading. Linear models were run with group and
  narrative type as fixed effects to examine the narrative microstructure elements of total number of words,
  number of different words, internal state terms, and mean length of utterance. Additionally, correlations
  were run between microstructure elements on both narratives and score on the autism questionnaire and
  frequency of reading.
  Results: The autistic adults had a lower score than non-autistic controls on all microstructure elements
  except for mean length of utterance on the fictional narrative. However, the autistic adults had improved
  performance on the interest-based personal narrative such that they were similar to non-autistic
  participants for total number of words and number of different words and not equal to but closer to the
  non-autistic participants for internal state terms than they were on the fictional narrative. Score on the
  autism questionnaire was only correlated with microstructure elements on the fictional narrative and not
  the interest-based personal narrative. Frequency of reading was only found to have significant
  correlations when the two groups were split, indicating that frequency of reading may affect the two
  populations differently.
  Conclusion: Autistic individuals appear to benefit from an interest-based prompt on narrative
  microstructure performance. This study contributes to the growing evidence for the benefits which
  engaging autistic individuals’ special interests has for their language performance, and supports a
  strength-based theory of special interests. It is suggested that special interests should be utilized in
  education, therapy, and general life in order to increase the success of autistic individuals. This study had
  limitations in group participant numbers and further research is needed to fully understand the extent of
  benefits that special interest have for this population.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Linguistics
  • Fictional Narratives
  • Autism
  • Microstructure
  • Personal Narratives
  • Special Interests

• Graduation date

  Spring 2024

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-3x3a-4856

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.