Pauses in the narratives produced by autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children as an index of cognitive demand.
Autistic kids’ stories contain fewer within-phrase pauses—an easy-to-count marker that may index lower cognitive/communicative demand.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked kids to tell a story from a picture book.
The group had autistic children, children with intellectual disability, and typical children.
They counted pauses that break grammar rules (nongrammatical pauses) as a sign of mental effort.
What they found
Autistic children used fewer nongrammatical pauses than the other two groups.
Fewer within-phrase stops hints that their storytelling task felt less demanding.
How this fits with other research
Flory et al. (1974) showed adults pause longer when more work is coming.
Taylor et al. (1993) flips the idea: fewer pauses can also mark low load, at least in kids’ speech.
Tiede et al. (2019) meta-analysis proves naturalistic teaching boosts language in autistic preschoolers.
Pause counting gives you a quick, no-tech way to watch that growth session-by-session.
Why it matters
You can tally within-phrase pauses while a client tells a story. A drop in these pauses week-to-week may show the task is getting easier and language is firming up. Pair the count with standard measures to spot real gains early.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study investigated the production of different types of speech pauses and repairs in the story narratives produced by autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children, matched on verbal mental age. Ten children in each group were asked to tell the story depicted in a wordless picture book. The narratives were analyzed for frequency of grammatical (between phrase) and nongrammatical (within phrase) pauses, and for several measures of story length and complexity. The main results were that children with autism produced significantly fewer nongrammatical pauses, and that their nongrammatical pausing was correlated with measures of story length and complexity. These findings suggest that the stories told by the autistic children reflect reduced cognitive and communicative demand. The implications of this study for future research on the use of a variety of prosodic characteristics as measures of social cognitive deficit in autism are discussed.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1993 · doi:10.1007/BF01046222