Storytelling and Special Interests: Microstructure in the Fictional and Personal Narratives of Autistic Adults
Creators: Daley, Natasha
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2024

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