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Narrative, Literacy and Other Skills: Studies in intervention
Edited by Edy Veneziano and Ageliki Nicolopoulou
[Studies in Narrative 25] 2019
► pp. 285–312

Chapter 13
Promoting narratives through a short conversational intervention in typically-developing and high-functioning children with ASD

| Paris Descartes University – CNRS
| Paris Descartes University

This chapter describes a short conversational intervention (SCI) procedure aiming to promote narrative skills in young children. The SCI solicits children’s thinking and talk about the causes of the events in a story of a misunderstanding between two characters, The Stone story. We first report results obtained in several previous studies of typically-developing (TD) children in the 4- to 10-year age range, showing the positive immediate, as well as delayed, effect of the procedure from 6 years of age onwards. We then present a new study investigating whether the SCI could also help children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to narrate stories containing more causal and mental content. Results show that after the SCI these children, like the TD matched controls, provided more explanations and attributed more internal states to the characters, although the latter to a lesser degree than TD controls. The socio-cognitive processes underlying these changes, as well as the implications of using this intervention procedure, are discussed.

Keywords: Narrative development, intervention procedures, evaluative content, explanations, internal states, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Theory of Mind
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Narratives in typically-developing children
    • Narrative development in TD children
    • Intervention procedures to promote TD children’s narrative skills
    • The SCI and its rationale
    • The Stone story
    • The overall procedure
    • Results from previous studies
  • Narratives in children with high-functioning autism (HFA)
    • Narrative skills in children with HFA
    • Promoting narrative skills in children with ASD
  • Using the SCI with children with HFA
    • Participants
    • Procedure
    • Data analysis
      • Events of the story
      • Inferential aspects
        • Explanation of events
        • The attribution of internal states
  • Results
    • The events of the story and its overall temporal adequacy
    • Inferential aspects of the story
      • Total number of explanations
      • Types of explanations
      • Total number of internal states
      • Types of internal states
      • The false belief (FB) and the rectification of the false belief (RFB)
    • An example of a positive change between the first and the second narrative from a child with HFA
  • Discussion
    • The SCI with TD children
    • The SCI with children with HFA
    • How to explain the benefits of the SCI
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.25.14ven
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