How Autistic Children May Use Narrative Discourse to Scaffold Coherent Interpretations of Events: A Case Study

Abstract

High-functioning autistic children often behave as if they fail to integrate information or seek out coherence. In this article we present a social-pragmatic account of this impairment, in which we propose that social and linguistic deficits tend to isolate autistic children from the experiences that promote the integration of information by other children. This hypothesis is based on the view that, in typical human development, language plays a central role in creating coherence, including the ability to infer the intentions of others. The proposal is supported by a case study of an autistic adolescent who, when provided with adult scaffolding as he repeatedly retells a story, shows the same kinds of changes shown by unimpaired, although younger, children. An implication is that the difficulty that autistic children have in pulling information together arises, in part, from problems with the narrative mode of discourse. We infer that, provided with the right kinds of language-use experiences, high-functioning autistic children may develop the ability to find coherence in the events they experience.