La valutazione delle abilità narrative nei Disturbi dello Spettro Autistico (ASD)

The paper aims to explore if mental time travel (i.e., the ability to reconstruct in one's autobiographical memory scenarios of one's past or generate plausible scenarios about one's future), islinked to difficulties in story generation in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Forty-sixchildren with ASD and forty-sixwith typical cognitive and language development participated in the study. They wereasked to generate stories under three conditions: in a first condition they had to generate the beginning (i.e., Foreword); in a second condition they had to generate the plot (i.e., Interweaving); in a third condition they had to generate the end (i.e., Epilogue). The transcripts of these stories were analyzedaccording to the parameters established by Marini and Carlomagno (2004).To explorethe possible difference between groups and conditions these data were analyzedwith a series of mixed ANOVAs with repeated measures. These analyses showed the presence of lan-guage difficulties in children with ASD that appearedto be particularly evident in certain conditions rather than in others