Autistic and non-autistic women's written narratives of emotional autobiographical memories: a linguistic analysis

Narrative research has been identified as a great tool in linguistic studies, as it ecologically reveals qualitative and quantitative differences in individuals experiencing communicative difficulties - but who still show good structural language skills (Geelhand et al. 2020; Manolitsi & Botting, 2011). Narrative research within the autistic population has until now included predominantly male samples, but it is now argued that the communicative profile of autistic women might differ from men's (Sturrock et al. 2020). However, the nature of these differences is still poorly understood. Moreover, most narrative studies rely on oral tasks; given that autistic adults tend to prefer written or computer-mediated communication (Gillespie-Lynch et al. 2020), it is surprising that the written communication of autistic adults has not been thoroughly investigated yet.With this study, we aimed at offering a better perspective on the specific linguistic challenges that autistic women face compared to non-autistic (NA) women, through a semi-structured task that resembles every-day narrative situations (i.e. memories storytelling). Participants were 15 autistic and 15 non-autistic (NA) cisgender women, pairwise matched on age (M(age)= 34.73). As the study took place during the lockdown, recruitment and testing were done online and in writing. Participants were asked to write 4 autobiographical memories, based on 4 emotional cue words. No time limit was given, but a minimum and maximum number of characters were allowed for each narrative (1000-1800).Group differences were found in all aspects of the analysis, the first being the microstructure: autistic women wrote longer narratives, used more unique and infrequent words, and showed greater productivity than NA women. On the macrostructure level, autistic women showed reduced use of explicit causal connectives. As for the internal state language, autistic women used less cognitive state terms but slightly more perceptual terms.Mic
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished