An Investigation of the Micro- and Macro-Structures of Narratives by Bilingual Kurdish-Persian Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

The present study investigated the effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on children’s abilities to narrate a story. To this aim, the stories narrated by monolingual and bilingual Kurdish-Persian-speaking children with and without ASD were compared. They were given a set of 3 picture cards depicting a scenario and were asked to sequence the cards and tell a story. Then, their language productions (number of utterances and total number of words), macrostructures (appropriate sequencing of events, number of events mentioned, and coherence), and microstructures (character introductions, maintenance of referential terms, use of grammatical gender, and use of connectives) were measured. The findings showed that the bilinguals produced more utterances compared to the monolinguals despite having marginally lower receptive vocabulary scores in Persian. Also, the typically-developing children provided more coherent narratives. No significant differences were found in their microstructures. There were no decrements in the narratives of the monolingual and bilingual children with and without ASD. In fact, an increased number of utterances were found in the bilinguals’ narratives. The current findings suggested that bilingualism does not negatively affect narrative skills in children with ASD.