Narrative production in autistic adults: A systematic analysis of the microstructure, macrostructure and internal state language.

While narrative competence has been well documented in autistic children and young adolescents, fairly little is known about narrative performance of autistic adults. However, narrative abilities continue to develop well into adulthood. Hence, the main objective of the present study is to provide a clearer linguistic and communicative profile of ASD in adulthood by performing a systematic description of narrative performance in autistic adults. A specific annotation scheme was developed to code narrative production, in order to be able to compare the production of autistic participants to pairwise matched neurotypical adults relative to microstructure (syntactic complexity), macrostructure (overall story structure and cohesive ties) and internal state language of the corpus' narratives. The results suggest that autistic adults performed worse than their neurotypical peers on all three dimensions of narrative production, resulting in less coherent narratives overall for autistic adults. • Narrative production continues to be an area of difficulty for ASD adults. • Group differences emerged in all three main dimensions of narrative production. • ASD adults exploit linguistic features less efficiently to enhance their narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]