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Autistic and non-autistic women's written narratives of emotional autobiographical memories: a linguistic analysis

par Merken, Florence ;Geelhand, Philippine
Référence Special Interest Conference on Narrative Identity: Insights From Research to Practice (Université de Lille)
Publication Non publié, 2023-06

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Résumé :

Narrative research has been identified as a great tool in linguistic studies, as it ecologically reveals qualitative and quantitative differences in individuals experiencing communicative difficulties - but who still show good structural language skills (Geelhand et al., 2020; Manolitsi & Botting, 2011). Narrative research within the autistic population has until now included predominantly male samples, but it is now argued that the communicative profile of autistic women might differ from men's (Sturrock et al., 2020). However, the nature of these differences is still poorly understood. Moreover, most narrative studies rely on oral tasks; given that autistic adults tend to prefer written or computer-mediated communication (Gillespie-Lynch et al., 2020), it is surprising that the written communication of autistic adults has not been thoroughly investigated yet.With this study, we aimed at offering a better perspective on the specific linguistic challenges that autistic women face compared to non-autistic (NA) women, through a semi-structured task that resembles every-day narrative situations (i.e., memories storytelling). Participants were 15 autistic and 15 non-autistic (NA) cisgender women, pairwise matched on age (M(age)= 34.73). As the study took place during the lockdown, recruitment and testing were done online and in writing. Participants were asked to write 4 autobiographical memories, based on 4 emotional cue words. No time limit was given, but a minimum and maximum number of characters were allowed for each narrative (1000-1800).Group differences were found in all aspects of the analysis, the first being the microstructure: autistic women wrote longer narratives, used more unique and infrequent words, and showed greater productivity than NA women. On the macrostructure level, autistic women showed reduced use of explicit causal connectives. As for the internal state language, autistic women used less cognitive state terms but slightly more perceptual terms.Microstructure results seem in line with those observed in written studies that previously included mostly men (Brown et al., 2014; Price et al., 2020), which could indicate a specific microstructural profile of autistic adults in writing. Autistic women however wrote longer narratives and used more perceptual terms than NA women, which shows unique traits that were not identified in predominantly men samples (Finnegan & Accardo, 2018). Macrostructure and internal state language measures seem to corroborate results observed in oral studies (Geelhand et al., 2020), indicating common challenges of narrative expression for autistic adults, in both writing and speaking. This indicates that although the atypical features of autistic women’s communication may be more discrete than those of autistic men (Sturrock et al., 2020), they are still not comparable to NA women, suggesting that autistic women still experience challenges that may be harder to perceive. This exploratory study led to the preparation of a bigger research project investigating both the influence of gender (in a non-binary approach) and medium of communication (oral or written).