Peristeri Eleni, Drakoulaki Katerina, Boznou Antonia, Nerantzini Michaela, Varlokosta Spyridoula
Department of Theoretical & Applied Linguistics, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessalonike, Greece.
Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
Autism Dev Lang Impair. 2025 May 11;10:23969415251331045. doi: 10.1177/23969415251331045. eCollection 2025 Jan-Dec.
The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS-2) is considered a "gold standard" diagnostic instrument in the assessment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The Monkey Cartoon task is an optional pictured storytelling task in ADOS-2, which has been designed to assess gestural and verbal communication in autistic children while telling a story. It is well established that storytelling is challenging for autistic children, particularly for the content and coherent organization of the story, also known as narrative macrostructure. Existing evidence on the efficacy of the Monkey Cartoon task to pinpoint differences between autistic and neurotypical individuals in narrative macrostructure is scant. In this study, we used a version of the Monkey Cartoon task with modified scoring to analyze the narrative macrostructural skills of two groups of children with and without ASD. We also investigated the relations between narrative macrostructure and language ability in each group.
A group of 16 Greek-speaking autistic children and 16 age- and IQ-matched neurotypical children were administered the Monkey Cartoon storytelling task. Children's vocabulary and syntactic skills were also measured. Narratives were analyzed in terms of macrostructural features, including story completeness and story grammar, as well as units denoting the setting, internal responses and added details.
The autistic children had lower scores in communicating the story content rather than story grammar. Moreover, the autistic group tended to include less information on the story's setting and more off-topic utterances than their neurotypical peers. Regarding the relations between narrative macrostructure and language ability, the two groups dissociated since the autistic children tended to rely on vocabulary at the expense of including irrelevant information in their narratives, while neurotypical children relied on both lexical and syntactic skills, especially when instantiating references to the story characters' mental states and the setting of the story, respectively.
The Monkey Cartoon storytelling task seems to be efficient at revealing pragmatic weaknesses mainly at the thematic content level in autistic children. Also, the frequent use of semantically- and pragmatically-irrelevant information in storytelling differentiated autistic from neurotypical children, and may thus be treated as a distinguishing feature of ASD in narrative production.
The findings demonstrate the viability of the Monkey Cartoon task in highlighting language markers of ASD in narrative macrostructure, with clinical implications for enhancing clinical practice in countries like Greece that face a shortage of narrative assessment tools for autistic children.
《自闭症诊断观察量表（第二版）》（ADOS - 2）被认为是评估自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的“金标准”诊断工具。猴子卡通任务是ADOS - 2中的一项可选图片讲故事任务，旨在评估自闭症儿童在讲故事时的手势和语言交流能力。众所周知，讲故事对自闭症儿童来说具有挑战性，尤其是故事的内容和连贯组织，即叙事宏观结构。关于猴子卡通任务在确定自闭症个体与神经典型个体在叙事宏观结构方面差异的有效性，现有证据很少。在本研究中，我们使用了一个经过修改评分的猴子卡通任务版本，来分析两组有和没有ASD的儿童的叙事宏观结构技能。我们还研究了每组中叙事宏观结构与语言能力之间的关系。
对一组16名讲希腊语的自闭症儿童和16名年龄及智商匹配的神经典型儿童进行了猴子卡通讲故事任务。还测量了儿童的词汇和句法技能。从宏观结构特征方面分析叙事，包括故事完整性和故事语法，以及表示背景、内部反应和补充细节的单元。
自闭症儿童在传达故事内容方面的得分低于故事语法方面的得分。此外，与神经典型同龄人相比，自闭症组在故事背景方面包含的信息较少，且离题话语更多。关于叙事宏观结构与语言能力之间的关系，两组有所不同，因为自闭症儿童倾向于依赖词汇，却在叙事中包含了不相关信息，而神经典型儿童则同时依赖词汇和句法技能，尤其是在分别提及故事人物的心理状态和故事背景时。
猴子卡通讲故事任务似乎能够有效地揭示自闭症儿童主要在主题内容层面的语用弱点。此外，在讲故事时频繁使用语义和语用不相关信息使自闭症儿童与神经典型儿童有所区别，因此这可能被视为自闭症在叙事生成方面的一个显著特征。
研究结果证明了猴子卡通任务在突出ASD在叙事宏观结构中的语言标记方面的可行性，对希腊等国家的临床实践具有启示意义，这些国家面临着自闭症儿童叙事评估工具短缺的问题。
