The narrative construction of our (social) world: steps towards an interactive learning environment for children with autism

Abstract

Children with autism exhibit a deficit in narrative comprehension which adversely impacts upon their social world. The authors’ research agenda is to develop an interactive software system which promotes an understanding of narrative structure (and thus the social world) while addressing the needs of individual children. This paper reports the results from a longitudinal study, focussing on ‘primitive’ elements of narrative, presented as proto-narratives, in an interactive software game which adapts to the abilities of individual children. A correlation has been found with a real-world narrative comprehension task, and for most children a clear distinction in their understanding of narrative components.