Can Narrative Skills Improve in Autism Spectrum Disorder? A Preliminary Study with Verbally Fluent Adolescents Receiving the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting social and communicative skills, including narrative ability, namely the description of real-life or fictive accounts of temporally and causally related events. With this study, we aimed to determine whether a communicative-pragmatic training, i.e., the version for adolescents of the Cognitive-Pragmatic Treatment, is effective in improving the narrative skills of 16 verbally fluent adolescents with ASD. We used a multilevel approach to assess pre- and post-training narrative production skills. Discourse analysis focused on micro- (i.e., mean length of utterance, complete sentences, omissions of morphosyntactic information) and macrolinguistic measures (i.e., cohesion, coherence errors, lexical informativeness). Results revealed a significant improvement in mean length of utterance and complete sentences and a decrease in cohesion errors. No significant change was found in the other narrative measures investigated. Our findings suggest that a pragmatically oriented training may be useful in improving grammatical efficiency in narrative production

Development of communicative-pragmatic abilities in children with early cochlear implants

Cochlear Implants (CIs) enhance linguistic skills in deaf or hard of hearing children (D/HH). However, the benefits of CIs have not been sufficiently studied, especially with regard to communicative-pragmatics, i.e., the ability to communicate appropriately in a specific context using different expressive means, such as language and extralinguistic or paralinguistic cues. The study aimed to assess the development of communicative-pragmatic ability, through the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), in school-aged children with CIs, to compare their performance to a group of children with typical auditory development (TA), and to investigate if CI received under the age of 24 months promotes the typical development of such ability. Results show that children with CIs performed significantly worse than TA on the paralinguistic and contextual scales of the ABaCo. Finally, the age of first implantation had a significant role in the development of communicative-pragmatic ability