Pragmatic Language Skills in Storytelling of Five-Year-Old Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Five-Year-Old Children with Typical Development

Children with autism spectrum disorder have many similarities, but there are also significant differences between them. The disorder varies in frequency and intensity, and deviations in the development of verbal and non-verbal communication are common. The problems often particularly reflect the pragmatic level of language, i.e. the ability to use language appropriately and effectively in a social context. One of the indicators for the development of a child???s pragmatic speech/language skills is storytelling. This article presents the study in which the storytelling characteristics of five-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder and the storytelling characteristics of five-year-old children with typical development were compared using the Little Glove Storytelling Test. The overall performance of children with autism spectrum disorder in the Little Glove Storytelling Test was statistically significantly lower than that of their peers with typical development. We found that at least some of the children with autism spectrum disorder are able to invent stories comparable to the stories of children with typical development, but they have lower scores on most indicators for story evaluation. For those children, it is necessary to provide support and help at both the grammatical and pragmatic levels of language.