Narrative discourse comprehension in Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder: evidence from Aesop’s fables

Introduction Theory of Mind, i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to others, is critical for social communication but is often impaired in autism. Although narrative tasks have been extensively used to study Theory of Mind in autism, moral judgement of the story protagonists’ actions has not received equal attention. The current study aimed to assess cognitive and affective Theory of Mind, as well as moral reasoning skills in autistic children through Aesop’s fable comprehension. Methods In this study, 25 autistic children and two equally-sized groups of typically-developing age- and language-matched children listened to two fables, and answered questions assessing the attribution of affective and cognitive mental states to fable protagonists, as well as their judgment about the moral of each fable. Crucially, the two fables differed in terms of language complexity, which was operationalized in terms of vocabulary and syntax, as well as in the use of decontextualized language, i.e., expressions that anchor events in the past. Results We found that the autistic children showed significantly lower comprehension performance than typically-developing age-matched children in affective and cognitive Theory of Mind questions, while no differences were found between autistic and typically-developing language-matched children. Also, the autistic children exhibited considerable weaknesses in verbalizing the moral, however, this weakness depended on the language complexity of the fables. Discussion The findings demonstrate that autistic children face challenges in both Theory of Mind and moral judgment in narrative comprehension, particularly when the stimuli are linguistically demanding. Aesop’s fables seem to offer a promising venue as a window into the moral judgment skills of autistic children.