Mads Nielsen, University of Copenhagen
Rikke Vang Christensen, University of Copenhagen
Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, University of Copenhagen
Taking narratives as a linguistic reflection of parts of mental organisation, this study investigates how 10-to-14-year-old Danish-speaking children with typical development (TD; n = 30), autism spectrum disorders (ASD; n = 27) and developmental language disorders (DLD; n = 12) report events in two short animated videos, both of which consist of simple geometrical figures moving around. One of the videos is designed to elicit descriptions of physical events, e.g. ‘orbiting’ and ‘rotating’ (Klin & Jones 2006), the other is designed to elicit descriptions of social events, e.g. ‘fighting’ and ‘chasing’ (Heider & Simmel 1944). All of the children are matched on age, IQ and memory, and the TD and ASD children also on vocabulary and grammar comprehension.
First, we examined how likely the children are at attributing intentionality to the geometrical figures in the videos, e.g. do they describe them as bumping around or as fighting? Previous studies show divergent results (e.g. Bowler & Thommen 2000, Castelli et al. 2002, White et al. 2011), probably in part because their linguistic data are coded according to somewhat impressionistic rather than exact semantic criteria. We argue that a systematic semantic analysis of predicates is a more reliable measure of linguistic attribution of intentionality. Our comparison of children with TD and ASD shows that there is no difference in how likely they are at attributing intentionality linguistically in either task.
Second, we compared the stories in the three groups of children in terms of how much relevant information they include. We rated the children’s narratives on an index based on adults’ stories about the same videos. Preliminary analyses suggest that there are significant differences between the groups on both narrative tasks. Specifically, TD children appear to include more relevant events than the two diagnostic groups, no matter whether the story highlights social or physical relations between ‘characters’. Taken together with the findings on intentionality, it appears that the more idiosyncratic narratives by the children with ASD are not due to difficulties with detecting intentionality. Further analyses will be made to see whether language difficulties, social difficulties, or difficulties with integrating information may explain the different relevance ratings of the children’s narratives.
We believe that this study through the use of precise semantic analysis and methodological triangulation brings us a small but important step closer to unravel some of the complexity of the difficulties that children with ASD or DLD experience.
References
Bowler, Dermot M. & Evelyne Thommen. 2000. Attribution of mechanical and social causality to animated displays by children with autism. Autism 4(2), 147-171. doi:10.1177/1362361300004002004.
Castelli, Fulvia, Chris D. Frith, Francesca G. Happé & Uta Frith. 2002. Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes. Brain 125, 1839-1849. doi:10.1093/brain/awf189.
Heider, Fritz & Marianne Simmel. 1944. An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology 57(2), 243-259. doi:10.2307/1416950.
Klin, Ami & Jones Warren. 2006. Attributing social and physical meaning to ambigious visual displays in individuals with higher-functioning autism spectrum disorders. Brain and Cognition 61, 40-53. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2005.12.016.
White, Sarah, Devorah Coniston, Rosannagh Rogers & Uta Frith. 2011. Developing the Frith-Happé animations: A quick and objective test of theory of mind for adults with autism. Autism Research 4, 149-154. doi:10.1002/aur.174.