Table 5.
Verbatim Examples of Personal Narratives Written by Children with and without ASD
| Text 1: Neurotypical Child (Quality Score: 12) |
|---|
| “Once when I was in 1st grand I had a big fight with my best friend over prety much nothing. It started when I told him that my pokémon cards would cream him in a battle, so we had one. I creamed him and he got realy, realy, mad at me and ran away so fast that he droped his Charzard EX. I took it from the ground and kept it till the next day. When I gave it to him he fliped out that I had taken it, thinking that I had stolen it. When I tryed to tell him that I had tryed to give it to him the day before he refused to belive me and grabed it and took off. That was the last time I ever talked to him. When I moved here I became friends with Fred and whe have been best friends to this day.” |
| Text 2: Child with ASD (Quality Score: 3) |
| “about trying to be first in line. I do not want to be last in line. because my stuff will be a mess. I’ll feel angriest!” |
| Text 3: Child with ASD (Quality Score: 6) |
| “One time when I had a problem or a fight with someone is when I have to go the store with mom I don’t liken it at all. One of the reasons why I don’t like it is I can’t access some of the things on my tablet in the car because there is no wifi connection in the car and I was hoping to do some of it. Another reason is it is not fun at all at the store there is nothing to do but shop and I’d rather be home playing my games than being at the store. Those are the reasons why I don’t like the going to the store with mom during break.” |
Note.
Text 1 is an example of a writing sample produced by a NT child. Text 2 provides an example of a child with ASD who demonstrated challenges with writing at both the microstructure and macrostructure level. Text 3 provides an example of a child with ASD who had difficulty creating a personalized narrative that focused on one specific event, but used complex vocabulary and sentence structure. Texts are shown almost exactly as children typed them, including the grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors. One exception to this is that all names have been changed for confidentiality purposes. Quality ratings ranged from 0 to 12.