Focus on the Narrative Skills of Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder and High Functioning Autism.

Purpose: Narratives of personal experiences emerge early in language acquisition and are particularly commonly experienced in children's daily lives. To produce these stories, children need to develop narrative, linguistic, and social-cognitive skills. Research has shown that these skills are impaired in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and high functioning autism (HFA). Aim: This study aimed to determine whether narrative skills are still impaired in adolescence and to highlight the language similarities and differences between teenagers with DLD and HFA in the production of a narrative of a personal experience. Method: Ten teenagers with DLD, 10 teenagers with HFA and 10 typically developing (TD) teenagers, matched on chronological age, told a narrative of a personal experience. These stories were analyzed to evaluate narrative skills through coherence (respect of the narrative schema) and cohesion (anaphora and connectors) and social-cognitive skills (affective and cognitive mental states of the characters, and arbitrary vocalizations such as voice noises). Results: Teenagers with DLD were less compliant with the complication step in the narrative schema than teenagers with HFA or TD. No difference was observed between the three groups of teenagers in terms of cohesion or regarding the positive and negative social-cognitive skills used in narratives. Conclusion: When producing a narrative of a personal experience, HFA teens do not have difficulties neither with narrative skills and with social-cognitive skills assessed in this paper. In DLD the profile of the teens is not the same: They do not have difficulties with social-cognitive skills and with a part of narrative skills (cohesion), and they have difficulties with the narrative schema.

Stimulating parents' self-efficacy beliefs or verbal responsiveness: Which is the best way to decrease children's externalizing behaviors?

This research aimed at determining which of two types of parenting variable, self-efficacy beliefs and verbal responsiveness, cause significant decreases in preschoolers' externalizing behavior - in particular motor activity, non compliance, irritability, aggressiveness and inattention - and to what extent. Two micro-trials were used to achieve this goal. The 45 parents participating were randomly assigned to an 8-week waiting list followed by an 8-week intervention condition focusing on self-efficacy stimulation, or to an 8-week intervention condition focusing on verbal responsiveness stimulation. It can be concluded from the results that the two manipulations were effective in decreasing aggressive behavior and non compliance. However, the improvement of self-efficacy beliefs has an effect on children's externalizing behavior across a slightly larger spectrum than the enhancement of verbal responsiveness since it was also effective in reducing irritability. Neither of the two manipulations resulted in a decrease of attention problems or motor activity. The results are discussed for their research and clinical implications.