Narrative writing competence and internal state terms of young adults clinically diagnosed with childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Adults with childhood ADHD write stories with weaker grammar, looser plots, and fewer feeling words.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Miranda et al. (2013) asked young adults with childhood ADHD to write a story. A same-age group without ADHD did the same task.
The team scored every story for three things: microstructure (sentence grammar), macrostructure (plot flow), and internal-state words (think "happy," "guess," "wish").
What they found
The ADHD group scored lower on all three measures. Their sentences were weaker, plots were looser, and they used fewer mental-state words.
The gap was medium-sized, showing the writing issues last well past grade school.
How this fits with other research
The finding lines up with Shen et al. (2012) and Capodieci et al. (2018), who saw similar handwriting and spelling problems in kids with ADHD. Ana’s team shows the trouble moves into adult-level storytelling.
Wang et al. (2025) looked at kids with both dyslexia and ADHD and found even larger handwriting deficits. Their newer data don’t cancel Ana’s; they just show added reading issues make the writing gap bigger.
Martinussen et al. (2015) found that ADHD teens struggle with reading for the same core reason—weak expressive vocabulary. Ana’s adults had the same vocabulary gap, now showing up in their own stories.
Why it matters
If you work with teens or adults with ADHD, don’t assume writing problems faded. Ask to see a short story or email; weak plot flow or missing feeling words can signal they need explicit story-mapping and emotion-vocabulary drills. Pair these with planning sheets that prompt "how did the character feel?" and "what happened next?" to shore up both macrostructure and internal-state language.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
OBJECTIVE: The first objective of this study was to compare the written expression competence of young adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with that of young adults without ADHD on three types of measures: indicators of the story's microstructure with regard to productivity and morphosyntax; indicators of the macrostructure (story grammar); and expressions of the mental states of the story's characters (internal state language). The second objective consisted of determining the relationships among the different narrative writing measures and the ADHD behavior ratings of inattention and hyperactivity obtained using the family observer report. METHOD: The sample was composed of 54 participants, aged from 18 to 24, divided equally into a group with a childhood clinical diagnosis of combined subtype ADHD and a control group without ADHD. Written composition was assessed using a narrative task based on a sequence of images. RESULTS: As expected, the young adults with ADHD obtained significantly worse results than the control group on the majority of the parameters of the story's microstructure and macrostructure. Likewise, they included a significantly lower number of terms about the characters' mental states. A correlation was also observed between measures of narrative competence and core symptoms of ADHD, as well as between the use of words with an emotional content and estimations related to core symptoms of ADHD. CONCLUSION: The findings of this study point out that expressive writing should be assessed in individuals with ADHD as part of screening and comprehensive evaluation. More research is needed to design and implement effective interventions in this area.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.03.014