| Author: | Srivastava, Vasundhara |
| Title: | Beyond structural analyses : examining topics, coherence and oral inferential comprehension when Hindi-speaking children with and without autism tell and understand stories |
| Advisors: | Chan, Wing-shan Angel (LST) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2026 |
| Department: | Department of Language Science and Technology |
| Pages: | xiii, 178 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | The current child language narrative literature has typically focused on the structural analysis (macrostructure and microstructure), while the functional/meaning dimensions of narratives have been relatively understudied. This is an important dimension that warrants more research, given that telling personal stories about what happened to oneself and understanding fictional stories so that one can infer the background and what happened to others can be viewed as an informative assessment of an individual's social-communication abilities in his/her communicative competence, and that children with language disorders, for instance, autistic children often exhibit difficulties in social communication– a key characteristic that can be more comprehensively assessed through the functional analysis of their narratives. This dissertation will mainly focus on the functional aspects of narratives, such as contents/topics of personal stories, coherence in personal stories, and inferential comprehension of fictional stories. These functional abilities warrant more research attention when the child language literature and speech therapy practices are still heavily skewed towards structural analyses of narrative competence. Unlike many existing narrative studies, the three thesis studies will take on a functional perspective, focusing on the contents and meanings expressed in children's narratives. Study one is an empirical first in documenting the contents/topics of personal stories told by autistic children and their TD age peers. 21 six-to-nine-year-old Hindi-speaking autistic children with low support needs and 30 age-matched TD children each told six personal stories, in response to six emotion/experience-based prompts (happy/excited, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important) in the Hindi version of the Global TALES protocol. The findings showed that despite these two groups were matched in expressive vocabulary and morphosyntax scores, the personal stories shared by autistic children were more restricted than their TD peers, where they did not mention social participation beyond immediate family, conflict management, or offering help, reflecting fewer life experiences of such. Study two is an empirical first in comparing the coherence of personal stories that involve positive versus negative emotional experiences shared by autistic children and their TD peers. 30 autistic children and 30 TD peers were matched in terms of vocabulary, morphosyntactic skills, and non-verbal IQ. The children were asked to narrate stories with positive and negative emotional polarity, which were then transcribed and rated for global ratings of coherence and local indicators contributing to global coherence. The findings revealed that autistic children's narratives scored significantly lower in coherence when recounting positive emotional experiences yet scored significantly higher in coherence for negative emotional experiences, even surpassing their TD peers in specific measures (e.g., global context; local temporal and thematic indicators). For both global ratings of coherence and local indicators of global coherence, between-group analysis indicated that autistic children had lower scores in "theme" compared to their TD peers when narrating positive emotional events. A qualitative analysis of thematic indicators (under local indicators to global coherence) further showed that autistic children produced no instances of opinion- or understanding-based themes in either their negative or positive narratives, a contrast to their TD peers who robustly included these thematic elements in their positive stories. These findings offer concrete guidance for parents of autistic children, practitioners, and SLPs working with these children, to strengthen thematic development, specifically by training them to incorporate opinion- and understanding-based themes into their storytelling. Study three compared the oral inferential comprehension abilities of fictional stories in the same two groups of children as in Study 2. A conceptual contribution of this study was the mapping of the MAIN comprehension questions onto Blank's Levels of Language Abstraction. This classical framework conceptualizes language comprehension into four levels of increasing abstraction and has influenced many researchers and clinicians in speech pathology and communication sciences and disorders. To better differentiate the quality of responses among these older children, the responses were scored using a more fine-grained, 4-point scheme adapted from the Pre-Language Assessment Instrument-2. The findings indicated that Level IV questions, which require reasoning based on perceptions and critical thinking and analysis, were particularly challenging for these autistic children relative to their TD peers. Furthermore, the refined scoring scheme was able to capture more group differences and better reveal the cognitive-linguistic vulnerabilities of the autistic children than the original, more lenient scoring scheme. These findings are impactful as they could inform intervention planning for children with autism. Practitioners working with autistic children should prioritize supporting autistic children with low support needs to share diverse and coherent personal experiences that are of emotional and personal significance and supporting them to develop oral inferential comprehension as essential clinical goals. These three dissertation studies are significant in various ways. First, they featured an understudied/under-documented language, Hindi, in the child language literature. Second, they examined three sets of abilities that are of functional importance to a child's narrative competence: contents/topics of personal stories, coherence of personal stories, and oral inferential comprehension of fictional stories. Third, the major assessment tools used in this dissertation, the Global Tales protocol and LITMUS-MAIN, have been adapted into numerous languages and cultures, and as such this line of investigations can be further extended into other languages and cultures to support future cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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