Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) work with a variety of populations at risk for poor autobiographical and episodic memory. The purpose of this tutorial is to describe autobiographical memory and how it is affected in children with autism spectrum disorder, attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder, hearing loss, and childhood trauma, as…

Parent narratives have contributed to ethnographic accounts of the lives of children with autism, but there are fewer examples of parents producing their own autoethnographies. This article explores the affordances of an online blog for enabling a parent of a child with autism to produce a written record of practice which may be considered…

Very little is known on the subject of educators with Asperger's syndrome (AS), and the available information pales in comparison to the enormous literature studying students with AS. While there are many resources for engaging students with AS, and increasing awareness of how AS affects student learning, discussions about the implications for…

The Transform Autism Education (TAE) project is a tri-national teacher training scheme involving Greece, Italy and the UK, whose purpose is to set up training projects to facilitate the educational inclusion of autistic children. Running over three years from 2014 to 2017, the involvement of autistic participants has been the source of some…

The purpose of this article is to analyse how humour and narratives about humour are used in a natural group of adults with Asperger's syndrome. Narratives about humour and use of humour in the group are analysed from a discursive psychological perspective, informed by insights from both disability studies and critical autism studies. The setting…

This paper explores Hero Stories, a different narrative approach developed to support a child with autism to gain self-control and allow him to navigate his world as a competent and capable learner. It examines the development and use of "Hero Stories books" as a strategy for assisting a child with autism to cope with stressful situations within…

Autobiographical memory impairments in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been attributed to a failure in using the self as an effective memory organisational system. To explore this hypothesis, we compared self-defining and everyday memories in adults with and without ASD. Results demonstrated that both groups were able to distinguish between…

This single-subject study examined the effects of a planning and self-regulation strategy on the story writing ability of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Three children with ASD in second and fourth grades were taught a strategy for planning and drafting a story using the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD; Harris &…

This paper examined the fundamental frequency variation in the narratives of individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) and typical controls matched on age, IQ, and verbal abilities. Study 1 found increased fundamental frequency variation in the speech of 21 children and adolescents with HFA when compared to 21 typical controls. Study 2…

Purpose: To evaluate classification accuracy and clinical feasibility of a narrative analysis tool for identifying children with a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). Method: Picture-elicited narratives generated by 16 age-matched pairs of school-aged children (FASD vs. typical development [TD]) were coded for semantic elaboration and…

In 2 studies mothers read wordless storybooks to their preschool-aged children; narratives were analyzed for mental state language. Children's theory-of-mind understanding (ToM) was concurrently assessed. In Study 1, children's (N=30; M age 3 years 9 months) ToM task performance was significantly correlated with mothers' explanatory, causal, and…

There is a wealth of autobiographical material produced by people who describe themselves as experiencing autistic spectrum disorders. Increasingly, these writers and academics are suggesting that professionals should be using this material to help develop understanding. This paper describes a small scale, qualitative research project that…

Autism is currently identified by a set of diagnostic criteria which are based on observable behaviour, denoting a pattern of impairments in communication and social reciprocity, and a tendency for restricted and stereotyped patterns of behaviour and interests. During the past eighteen years, biographical accounts have enriched the conventional…

This unique study used qualitative research methodology to investigate the first 18 years of parenting experiences of a mother of a child with autism. The purpose of this single case study was to record and understand the effect of autism on a mother's life retrospectively, to identify and analyse issues and themes that have shaped her life, to…