TouchStory: Towards an Interactive Learning Environment for Helping Children with Autism to Understand Narrative

Children with autism exhibit a deficit in the comprehension and creation of narrative which impacts their social world. Our ongoing research agenda is to find ways of developing interactive learning environments which enhance the ability of individual children with autism to deal with narrative and thus the social world. The study reported here involved 12 children in a longitudinal study which focussed on identifying the particular aspects of narrative which individual children found difficult. Our aim was to investigate each individual child’s understanding of ‘primitive’ components of narrative by means of an interactive software game called TouchStory which we developed for this purpose. Our results show, for most of the children, an ongoing and clear distinction in their understanding of the various narrative components, which relates their narrative comprehension as shown by a picture-story based narrative comprehension task.