Anaphoric References in Narrative Discourse on Children with Autism

This study compared the elicited narration of children with autism and the typically developing control group.We focused on the use of referential expressions in terms of introducing and tracking the story character during a story-retelling task.Results revealed significant differences in the referential choices between two groups:children with autism used far more definite references to introduce a character in the story,and they also tended to produce more zero references even when the characters were unspecified with respect to their discourse contexts.Moreover,in contrast to the anaphoric linking used by typically developing children,autism still relied upon the deictic references more often.