Narratives of Girls and Boys with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Gender Differences in Narrative Competence and Internal State Language.

The team asked the kids to tell a story from a wordless picture book. Half had autism; half were typically developing. Girls and boys were evenly split in each group.

They counted how well kids built the plot and how often they used feeling words like "happy," "scared," or "thought."

Girls with autism used more internal-state words than boys with autism. Both autism groups used fewer feeling words than typical kids.

Story structure scores were the same across all groups.

Crawford et al. (2015) saw no gender gap in social play or requests among toddlers with autism. Christina’s 2016 data now show a gap appears later, inside story-telling.

Baixauli et al. (2016) pooled 24 studies and found autistic kids tell weaker stories overall. Christina’s single study fits that big picture, but adds: look for girls to hide social gaps behind richer feeling words.

Llanes et al. (2020) later showed the same weakness holds when kids write personal stories. Together, the three papers say narrative tasks—oral or written—will expose autism-related gaps, with girls slightly ahead on feeling language.

When you run an autism evaluation, add a short story re-tell. Score two things: plot structure and feeling words. A girl who builds the plot fine but still uses few feeling words may need pragmatic goals even if her autism looks "mild." A boy with sparse feeling language is showing the expected profile—target both narrative and emotion vocabulary in intervention.