Narrative competence and internal state language of children with Asperger Syndrome and ADHD.
Kids with AS tell shorter stories and rarely mention thoughts or feelings—target cognitive-state language explicitly in narrative interventions.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rumpf et al. (2012) compared story-telling skills in three groups of late-elementary kids: Asperger Syndrome, ADHD, and neurotypical peers.
Each child told a wordless picture book story while researchers counted length, coherence, and mentions of thoughts or feelings.
What they found
Kids with AS and ADHD told shorter, choppier stories than controls.
Only the AS group almost never said words like "think," "know," or "feel"—their stories lacked inner-life language.
How this fits with other research
Kim et al. (2018) later showed that shared-reading with retell practice lifts narrative comprehension in elementary students with ASD, directly tackling the coherence gap this study found.
Howard et al. (2023) pushed the age range upward: adults with ASD/ID produced fuller personal stories after a macro-structure intervention, proving narrative training works past childhood.
Dong et al. (2025) moved younger—preschoolers with mild ASD improved language when parents used literal or inferential prompts during shared reading, catching the deficit earlier.
Together these papers form a lifespan ladder: assess early, intervene in school, refine in adulthood.
Why it matters
If a learner with ASD tells brief, robotic stories, weave cognitive-state vocabulary into your script: model "He thinks...," ask "How does she feel?," and reinforce answers.
Start in late elementary years, keep shared-reading or personal-story drills going, and you can narrow the narrative gap shown here.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The central question of the present study was whether there are differences between children with Asperger Syndrome (AS), children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and healthy controls (HC) with respect to the organization of narratives and their verbalization of internal states. Oral narrations of a wordless picture book produced by 31 children (11 with AS, 9 with ADHD, 11 HC, aged 8-12) were analyzed regarding the following linguistic variables: story length, sentence structure and sentence complexity, coherence and cohesion of the stories, verbalization of the narrator's perspective, as well as internal state language (verbal reference to mental states). Considerable similarities were noted between the two clinical groups, which deviate from HC children. Narratives of the children with AS and ADHD were shorter than the narratives produced by the HC children. The children of both clinical groups failed to point out the main aspects of the story. In particular, children with AS did not refer to cognitive states as often as the other groups. With respect to narrative coherence, they produced fewer pronominal references than HC children and children with ADHD. In conclusion, the two clinical groups differed from the HC group on a number of features, and a less frequent reference to cognitive states was identified for the children with AS.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2012 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2012.03.007