‘Once upon a ribbit’: Stories narrated by autistic children

Ten autistic, 10 mentally retarded and 10 normal children, matched on verbal mental age, were asked to narrate a story from a wordless picture book. The narratives were coded on a range of measures tapping the following characteristics: story length and complexity, story structure, referential devices, and affective and social‐cognitive narrative enrichment devices. The main findings were that, compared to both control groups, the autistic children produced significantly shorter stories and were less likely to include any causal statements to explain the relationship between events in the stories. For the autistic children, the use of a story schema, referential devices that took account of their listener's needs, and the frequency of enrichment devices were all significantly correlated, suggesting that they reflect the same underlying knowledge. These findings are discussed in relation to the theory of mind hypothesis of autism.