A Study On Competence Of Narrative Cohesion And Coherence In School-Age Mandarin-Speaking Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD),a kind of neurodevelopmental disorder,is mainly characterized by a prominent feature of impairments in social communication and interaction,along with repetitive patterns of behaviors and restricted interests.In modern society,the number of autistic children is increasing year by year,and they have emerged as a special group to be reckoned with.Narrative,as a complex social activity,is an effective way to develop the linguistic,cognitive and social skills for autistic children.Therefore,it is extremely significant to scientifically evaluate ASD children’s narrative ability and provide them with targeted intervention programs in terms of linguistic ability and social integration.For the research on autistic children’s narrative ability,a scientific evaluation system has been developed abroad and fruitful research results have also been achieved.On the contrary,domestic research in this regard is relatively unsystematic,and studies on ASD children’s narrative ability from the text level are scarce.To make up the gap,the current study takes the narrative text produced by school-age Mandarin-speaking autistic children as the research subject and focuses on the characteristics of ASD children’s narrative cohesion and coherence.The research questions are as follows: 1)What are the characteristics of narrative cohesion in school-age Mandarin-speaking children with ASD? 2)What are the characteristics of narrative coherence in school-age Mandarin-speaking children with ASD? 3)What pedagogical implications can be obtained based on ASD children’s characteristics in narrative cohesion and coherence? To this end,16 autistic children aged 8 to 11 from Hangzhou are recruited as participants,and the wordless picture book Frog,where are you? is employed to elicit children’s narrative samples.At the cohesion level,based on Huang’s and Halliday and Hasan’s classification of cohesion devices,the frequency and adequacy of children’s usages of cohesive devices are calculated.Then at the coherence level,ASD children’s performance is analyzed based on story grammar.The current study comes to following conclusions.Firstly,in terms of cohesion,ASD children’s acquisition of each cohesive tie is inconsistent and unbalanced.Of all ties,they exhibit the least difficulties in using temporal tie and perfective auxiliary word “le(了)”,and they are more likely to make mistakes in ellipsis,substitution and reference.In ellipsis and substitution,they are limited in omitting or substituting some redundant and verbose information and the most prominent problem in reference is ambiguous reference.In addition,they tend to avoid the usage of causal and adversative tie.Secondly,in terms of coherence,ASD children are best at introducing characters in stories,but they are less able in producing initiating event and consequence.Meanwhile,omission of story elements,close attention to some specific details,addition of irrelevant information,repetition of utterance and fragmented sentences are also common in ASD children’s narratives.Thirdly,based on the research findings,some pedagogical implications are obtained,such as integrating narrative training into daily life,emphasizing text and discourse teaching,teaching accordingly and focusing on individual differences and diversifying the forms of narrative training,laying a foundation for the improvement of ASD children’s narrative ability and social integration.