Here's the Story: Narrative Ability and Executive Function in Autism Spectrum Disorder.
For verbally fluent autistic kids, weaker inhibition predicts more repeated self-repairs while they tell a story.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Greco et al. (2023) asked kids to make up a story from a picture book. The group had autistic and non-autistic children who all spoke in full sentences.
While each child told the tale, the team counted the length, plot links, and repeated self-repairs. They also gave each child quick tests of inhibition, the skill needed to stop a thought and switch to a new one.
What they found
Autistic children told shorter, simpler stories. They also stopped themselves mid-sentence and repeated the same phrase more often.
The weaker a child's inhibition score, the more of these repetitive self-repairs showed up in the story.
How this fits with other research
King et al. (2014) saw the same shorter, less complex stories years earlier, so the narrative gap is stable across time.
Dall et al. (1997) looks like a clash: they found inhibition was intact in autistic kids. The key difference is the task. Stop-signal tests in a quiet lab may miss the real-life load of open-ended storytelling.
Godfrey et al. (2023) extends the line to adults, showing autistic people also forget story details unless they use a theme-based plan. Together the papers map a life-span arc: weak inhibition in childhood leads to on-the-spot story repairs, and later to memory gaps if strategies stay missing.
Why it matters
If a client keeps restarting sentences during conversation, do not just target 'better language.' Add brief inhibition drills like red-light games or turn-switching tasks, then jump straight back into story re-tell. The drill gives the child practice stopping a thought, and the story gives you data on whether the skill transfers to smooth speech.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Difficulties with narrative have been reported in individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the role of executive function on narrative ability has not been examined in ASD. In this study, we aimed to (1) examine whether narrative abilities of ASD children differed from neurotypical (NT) children who did not differ in age, sex, and IQ; and (2) investigate relations between executive function and narrative ability in ASD children. METHOD: Narratives were elicited from 64 ASD children and 26 NT children using a wordless picture book and coded to derive several aspects of narrative ability such as propositions, evaluative devices, and self-repairs. Executive functions (specifically, inhibition and working memory) were measured using both experimenter-administered assessment and parent-report measures. RESULTS: Compared to NT children, ASD children produced fewer propositions but did not differ in their use of evaluative devices and self-repairs during narrative production. Greater inhibitory challenges related to more self-repairs involving repetition of story elements, whereas working memory did not relate to any of the measures of narrative ability among ASD children. CONCLUSIONS: This study revealed that narratives by verbally fluent ASD children were shorter and less complex than those by NT children but did not differ in the specific features of narratives. Furthermore, although ASD children did not make more self-repairs than NT children, difficulty with inhibition was related to more self-repairs, indicating more dysfluent narrative production in ASD children, which has implications for intervention.
Research in autism spectrum disorders, 2023 · doi:10.1017/s0954579403000051