0000000000543303
AUTHOR
Leena Mäkinen
The development of narrative productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content in four- to eight-year-old Finnish children
This study focuses on the development of narrative structure and the relationship between narrative productivity and event content. A total of 172 Finnish children aged between four and eight participated. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content. Each measure showed a developmental trend. Concerning consecutive age groups, significant differences were observed between four- and five-year-olds in productivity and event content and between five- and six-year-olds in referential cohesion. Multiple regression analysis showed that the relationship between productivity and event content was important, and espe…
Neural-level associations of non-verbal pragmatic comprehension in young Finnish autistic adults
This video-based study examines the pragmatic non-verbal comprehension skills and corresponding neural-level findings in young Finnish autistic adults, and controls. Items from the Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCo) were chosen to evaluate the comprehension of non-verbal communication. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis of the functional magnetic resonance imaging data was used to reveal the synchrony of brain activation across participants during the viewing of pragmatically complex scenes of ABaCo videos. The results showed a significant difference between the ISC maps of the autistic and control groups in tasks involving the comprehension of non-verbal communication, there…