Table 4.
Means and Standard Deviations for Personal Narrative Writing Performance
| Writing Variable | Measurement | Children with ASD (n = 22) |
NT Children (n = 22) |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M (SD)/n | M (SD)/n | U/X2 | p | d/phi | ||
| Microstructure | ||||||
| Lexical complexity | Large words/total words | .09 (.01) | .11 (.01) | 229.50 | .77 | .11 |
| Syntactic complexity | Subordination index | 1.60 (.65) | 1.86 (.30) | 177.00 | .13 | .49 |
| Syntactic diversity | 2.05 (1.29) | 2.86 (1.04) | 154.00 | .03* | .70 | |
| Grammatical errors | Grammar errors/T-units | .34 (.54) | .10 (.15) | 134.50 | .009* | .61 |
| Writing conventions | Writing convention errors/T-units | 2.33 (2.60) | 1.18 (1.10) | 194.50 | .26 | .58 |
| Evaluation | Evaluative devices/T-units | .51 (.40) | .50 (.29) | 230.50 | .78 | .03 |
| Macrostructure | ||||||
| Productivity | Total T-units | 8.81 (6.54) | 11.09 (7.81) | 199.50 | .32 | .49 |
| Quality (ratings 0 – 12) | Total quality rating | 6.36 (4.28) | 9.00 (2.51) | 158.00 | .05* | .75 |
| Personalization | Proportion of personalized narratives | 16 (73%) | 28 (100%) | 6.95 | .008* | .40 |
| Behavioral Differences | ||||||
| Experimenter assistance | Needed attention redirection | 5 (23%) | 0 (0%) | 5.64 | .02* | .36 |
| Needed prompting | 10 (46%) | 2 (9%) | 7.33 | .007* | .41 | |
| Needed help with topic generation | 9 (41%) | 1 (4.5%) | 8.28 | .004* | .43 |
Note.
*
significant group difference