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Narrative capacity has been a focus of research efforts aimed at better understanding human cognition and language use for some decades. Of particular interest has been the study of variations in performance in the setting of language disorders. Autism, as an early-onset, pervasive developmental disorder involving impairments in cognition, social interaction and communication, both has significant impact on individuals' ability to function in society, and has been considered to offer potentially significant insights into the understanding of human cognition more generally. In the study of this disorder there has been a significant body of work on language and communication focusing on narrative. A narrative is an encapsulated form of discourse which requires sophisticated skills of planning and information encoding and which thereby offers a unique testing ground for an individual's linguistic, socio-cultural and cognitive abilities. Lesley Stirling is a linguist with a background in Cognitive Science and a long-standing interest in discourse analysis and experience in cross-disciplinary psycholinguistic research. Graham Barrington is a medical doctor working in paediatrics with a Masters degree in Cognitive Science on problems of mental state modeling. They began researching narrative and autism in 2004 with a case study of uncommonly rich written story retellings spontaneously produced by a then 7 year old child with autism. More recently Susan Douglas has joined the research team with a background of research on semantic and syntactic development in the language of children with autism. Stirling & Barrington (forthcoming) present a qualitative analysis of the narratives from this case study. They show that the stories exhibit a complex pattern of abilities and deficits: they have sophisticated episodic structure and show the ability to use a range of devices for managing perspective, but are nevertheless recognizably profoundly unusual in ways that can be modeled in terms of difficulties in the management of the relative knowledge states of characters, narrator, and audience. Subsequently we elicited oral narratives of the same stories, and Stirling, Barrington & Douglas (forthcoming) discuss these oral retellings with particular regard to dysfluencies and cognitive complexity. The "StoryLincs" project follows on from this early work. It is funded by an ARC Discovery Grant (DP0662936) awarded for three years from 2006-2008 to study autism and written narrative. The aim of the StoryLincs project is to survey written narrative capability in a population of primary-school aged children with high functioning autism who attend mainstream schooling in Victoria. We have established links with the Catholic Education Office of Victoria and families registered with Autism Victoria in achieving this aim, and will also be seeking participation from other interested families. Children will type their narratives into a purpose-designed computer program. We will study the narratives produced by these children for their linguistic characteristics, investigating in particular the way in which the children structure the narratives and whether they can indicate and distinguish the perspectives of themselves as narrator and the different characters in the story. In advancing our understanding of the language disorder of autism, the project is expected to benefit the children, their families and the community in furthering the basic research necessary for the development of new measures of performance, of use in the better assessment of children with language disorders and in the design and targeting of intervention programs. The specific research questions which direct this research agenda are:
This project is part of a longer term research agenda which recognizes the importance of better characterisation of the behavioural phenotypes of language disorders, currently recognised to be the critical roadblock to research in child language development and language disorders. Reports and prepublication versions of research papers available for downloading:
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