Specific Language Impairment and Autism Spectrum Disorder: similarities and differences in narrative discourse

Storytelling is a complex skill that involves linguistic, social, and cognitive skills. The objective of this work has been to carry out a comparative analysis of the narrative in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and children with Specific Language Impairment. Twenty children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, twenty children with Specific Language Impairment and a control group of twenty children with typical development participated in this research. For the narrative analysis, the task used was the story Frog, where are you? The production of cohesive resources was lower in the Autism Spectrum Disorder group. On the other hand, errors of omission and grammatical substitutions were more frequent in the Specific Language Impairment group. Consequently, intervention must be different for the two groups, giving priority to improve cohesive and global coherence resources in Autism Spectrum Disorder and to decrease functional grammatical errors in Specific Language Impairment.