Two times three little pigs: dysfluency, cognitive complexity & autism

This paper presents an analysis of dysfluencies in two oral retellings of a familiar children’s story by a young boy with autism. Thurber & Tager-Flusberg (1993) postulate a lower degree of cognitive and communicative investment to explain a lower frequency of non-grammatical pauses observed in elicited narratives of children with autism in comparison to typically developing and intellectually disabled controls. We also found a very low frequency of nongrammatical pauses in our data, but indications of high engagement and cognitive and communicative investment. We point to a wider range of dysfluencies as indicators of cognitive load, and show that the kind and location of dysfluencies produced may reveal which aspects of the narrative task are creating the greatest cognitive demand: here, mental state ascription, perspectivization, and adherence to story schema. This paper thus generates analytical options and hypotheses that can be explored further in a larger population of children with autism and typically developing controls.