Inferential narrative comprehension ability of young school-age children on the autism spectrum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and aims: The purpose of the current exploratory study was to describe the inferential narrative comprehension skills of young school-age children on the autism spectrum who, as a group, are at high risk of significant and persistent reading comprehension difficulties. Our aim was to investigate whether the anticipated difficulties in inferential narrative comprehension in the group of children with autism could be explained by the children's structural language ability as measured using a broad-spectrum standardized language test. Methods: = 14) on a standardized language test. All children participated in a narrative comprehension task, which involved listening to a novel story, while looking at pictures, and answering eight comprehension questions immediately afterwards. Comprehension questions were categorized into factual and inferential questions, with further categorization of the inferential questions into those tapping into the story characters' internal responses (mental states) or not. Children's responses were scored on a quality continuum (from 0: inadequate/off topic to 3: expected/correct). Results: Our results showed significantly lower scores across factual and inferential narrative comprehension in the ASD_BNL group, compared to the ASD_WNL and TD groups, supporting the importance of structural language skills for narrative comprehension. Furthermore, the TD group significantly outperformed the children in the ASD_WNL group on inferential comprehension. Finally, the children in the ASD_WNL group showed specific difficulties in answering the internal response inferential questions compared to their TD peers. Conclusions: Results from this exploratory study highlight the difficulties children on the autism spectrum may have in inferential narrative comprehension skills, regardless of sufficient structural language skills at word and sentence level. These findings support the importance of routinely assessing these narrative comprehension skills in children on the spectrum, who as a group are at high risk of persistent reading comprehension difficulties. Implications: In this study, we demonstrate how narrative comprehension can be assessed in young school-age children on the autism spectrum. The scoring system used to categorize children's responses may further assist in understanding children's performance, across a quality continuum, which can guide detailed goal setting and assist in early targeted intervention planning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".