Listening Text Story Comprehension and Story Recall in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD); A Glean to Social Inferencing Skills

Introduction: Comprehension of oral or written language involves complex process that requires the processing of both literal and inferential information and involves various components. However, children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) without cognitive impairment showed lacunae in their ability to infer meaning from spoken or test messages due to the specific pragmatic deficits. Present study investigated how ASD children with normal language (ALN) comprehend literal and inferential information in oral text. Method: Ten children with ALN without cognitive impairment in the age range of 5-8 years and ten age matched typically developing (TD) children participated in the study. Both TD and ALN group underwent evaluation for language skills, non-verbal cognitive skills using Assessment of Language Development (ALD) and Raven?s Colored Progressive Matrices - 2 (CPM -2). In addition, ASD symptomatology was ascertained through Child hood Autism rating Scale 2 (CARS-2). Clinical and control groups were evaluated as to their listening text comprehension and recall using stories. The listening text comprehension task necessitate the participants to answer questions about the literal content of the story, as well as questions involving two types of inferences: text-connecting and gap-filling. Results: The results of the study revealed that TD group outscored the clinical group on listening text comprehension involving inferential processing skills in both text connecting and gap filling task. However, ALN group performance in literal comprehension task was comparable to that of TD group. The results indicated that despite of having normal cognitive abilities and language children?s skills, the poor performance in inferential processing task by ALN group is due to underlying socio-pragmatic deficit as well as lack of social inferencing skills. There exists a strong relationship between morpho syntactic skills, vocabulary and story recall. Conclusion: It is concluded that there is strong relation exist between inferential processing skills and pragmatic deficits in ALN group. Further conclusion can be drawn that comprehension aids recalls by enabling the listener to build a more stable mental representation of the story. The pragmatics deficits in ALN compromises these processes.