The Effectiveness of Social Stories on Some Syntactic Features of Children with Autism

Autism Spectrum Disorder children have problems with social interaction, and in producing and comprehending language structures. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of telling social stories on the use of syntactic features of speech in children with autism.This was an Interventional, quasi-experimental single group study with a pretest-posttest design. The study subjects were selected by convenience sampling method which included 10 Persian-speaking (girls and boys) aged 7 to 15 years old with autism spectrum disorder (level 1: requiring support) from all autism population in Qazvin Autism Center (Sina), in 2019. The data was gathered through the book series of exceptional children's illustrated stories and pictorial flash cards which included syntactic components. It’s notable that in this level and before presenting social stories, descriptive speech (pictorial description) and spontaneous speech (that is used in everyday conversations) were taken from each autistic children in form of 50 language samples based on (Brown,1973) and considering to (Tek& Naigles, 2014) for a total of 1 hour, according to their syntactic features. Social stories were designed and written based on Gray (1993). The children received an interventional program (telling social stories) in 10 individual sessions 30 to 45 minutes. This study was done during 3 months. Syntactic problems in these children’s speech were analyzed after their spontaneous and pictorial speech was recorded. Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to analyze the data using SPSS, version 22. The results of analysis of Wilcoxon showed that telling social stories improved some syntactic features of children with autism (p˂0.05).Based on the present study findings, telling social stories improved some syntactic skills in the use of copula, compounds, intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, auxiliary verbs, the negative and simple present, continuous present and simple past.