Narrative Production Abilities in Mandarin-Speaking Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Narrative skills are important for communication and everyday interaction. This study examined how Mandarin-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produce oral narratives. Thirty-six Mandarin-speaking monolingual children at the preschool educational stage participated, including 18 children with ASD (mean age = 6;4, SD  = 0;11) and 18 typically developing (TD) children (mean age = 6;1, SD  = 0;4) who were matched on chronological age and expressive lexical ability. Children completed picture-based storytelling tasks from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Narrative production was analyzed in three dimensions: macrostructure (global organization of the story), microstructure (internal linguistic units), and internal state terms (ISTs). Results showed that children with ASD did not differ significantly from their TD peers in Attempt, IST diversity, or basic productivity measures, including the total number of utterances, the number of different words, and the overall frequency of conjunctions. In contrast, the ASD group showed significantly lower performance on story structure, story complexity, Goal, and Outcome, and produced fewer total words, shorter mean length of utterance in words, and fewer complex sentences. These findings indicate that Mandarin-speaking children with ASD show narrative difficulties in production, with particular weaknesses in macrostructural organization and specific aspects of microstructure. The results add to cross-linguistic evidence on autism-related narrative challenges and highlight the need for interventions in Mandarin that target episode organization, narrative elaboration, and syntactic complexity.