Recall, structure, and complexity in story retellings by children with ASD

Abstract

The research described in this chapter was motivated by a case study of spontaneous written story retellings by an 8-year-old boy with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Lincoln had demonstrable difficulties in conversational interaction but had produced a range of retellings of familiar children's stories such as "The Three Little Pigs" and "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," which exhibited interesting structural and perspectival characteristics (Stirling & Barrington, 2007). On the basis of this experience and the literature on ASD and narrative then available, we hypothesized that providing children with ASD with the opportunity to produce narratives within a maximally comfortable environment mi..