Spontaneous narrative of autistic children: features of the lexical level

This article presents the results of a psycholinguistic experiment, the purpose of which was to identify and analyze the features and diversity of the lexical level of spontaneous oral narratives of children with autism spectrum disorders (RAS) in comparison with children of typical development. To collect linguistic material, the participants of the experiment, aged 10-12 years, were invited to review and retell the film “About Pears”by W. Chafe. By using quantitative methods, narratives of both groups were analyzed, on the basis of which a number of results were obtained. The author defined the values of the coefficient of lexical diversity (CLR) that have a wide range in children with RAS as 0,3-0,8, and the average stable result in children of normal development as 0,4-0,5. The correlations of all the participants’ discourses with the mode of the parts of speech usage were established.