Narratives serve as vital tools for sharing messages and building social connections, especially among preadolescents. In this presentation, the narrative abilities of autistic preadolescents and the importance of analysing storytelling will be explored. The objective is to provide an overview of the emerging findings from a Research Honours project conducted at the University of South Australia, offering a comprehensive overview of the research's objectives, methodologies, results, and conclusions.

The objectives were to compare the narratives elicited by autistic preadolescents’ and typically developing preadolescents in terms of microstructure, macrostructure, and cognitive processes.

This mixed-methods study explored the narrative abilities of autistic preadolescents, with typical language abilities, those with autism and language impairments, and typically developing peers. Participants completed four cognitive and linguistic assessments including telling the Cinderella story, the digit span test, the nonword repetition test and the sentence repetition test.

The preliminary results have strong relevance to practice. It is inferred that results will reflect and expand upon current literature to be practical and meaningful for the autistic preadolescent population. The current evidence base demonstrates there are differences in narratives produced by autistic individuals when compared to typically developing peers. This is particularly notable in the selection of concrete nouns, ambiguous references, cohesion and the inclusion of story elements, which may be a result of varying linguistic and cognitive processes.

In conclusion, the significance of understanding authentic autistic communication will be viewed through a neurodiversity-affirming perspective. By understanding autistic preadolescents’ narratives, Speech Pathologists can empower individuals by providing more holistic communication support.

• How do autistic preadolescents’ narratives differ from typically developing preadolescents?
• What is the impact of co-occurring language impairments on autistic narrative abilities?
• What assessment tools can be used to analyse narrative abilities?
• What is the importance of understanding narrative performance in adolescents?

Personal narratives, or descriptions of personally experienced events, underpin many daily social interactions. Personal narration has two functions: (a) to relate information to the listener, and (b) to signal the listener what these events mean to the narrator. Given that children with Autism have distinctly different patterns of interests, relating to people, and perceiving the world, compared to neurotypical (NT) children, in this study we examined what topics both groups of children chose to talk about when sharing their personal narratives with an adult examiner. All children grew up in India, a collectivist society emphasizing the interdependency between individuals as members of a community.

Twenty-one six-to-nine-year-old Hindi-speaking autistic children with low-support-needs (diagnosed as level 1 on the Indian Scale for Assessment of Autism, with expressive morphosyntactic and vocabulary scores comparable to age-matched NT peers) and 30 age-matched NT children produced personal stories in response to emotion/experience-based prompts (happy, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important) in the Hindi version of the Global TALES protocol. All narratives were elicited in-person and audio-recorded for manual coding of topics.

The results reveal differences in topics between autistic and NT children in response to the prompts happy, worried, important, and problem, while similar topics were observed for the prompts annoyed and proud. The NT children tended to focus on human involvement and broader social relations in their stories, highlighting family events and interactions with peers. In contrast, autistic children often mentioned objects, nature, self-time, and mentioned only parents and siblings, without mentioning any parties, family gatherings, or festival celebrations.

In conclusion, these differences in topics may reflect the social engagement patterns and communication challenges experienced by autistic children. Documenting topics of personal stories may inspire speech-language pathologists when they consider what topics are functional/meaningful for the children and their families in assessment and intervention.

1) The study highlights that Hindi-speaking autistic children and their neurotypical (NT) peers showed similarities and differences in the topics they chose to talk about when sharing their personal stories in response to six emotion/experience-based prompts (happy, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important).
2) The observed differences between autistic and NT children may reflect distinct social engagement patterns and communication challenges experienced by Hindi-speaking autistic children.
3) Documenting the topics of personal stories, and how they may reflect the functional strengths and weaknesses of a child, may inspire speech-language pathologists when they consider what topics are functional/meaningful for their clients and families in assessment and intervention.

In this presentation, we discuss the impact of a year-long project designed to increase teacher and teaching assistants' (teaching staff) use of Key Word Sign (KWS) in a Prep-12 school for children and young people with Language Disorder.

The objective of this presentation is to outline strategies used in the education of teaching staff and their effects, including initial introductions, facilitating continued engagement and working collaboratively to troubleshoot issues. The project sought to increase frequency and efficiency of KWS throughout the school environment by teaching staff through a mixture of formal education sessions and shorter, more frequent activities and informational opportunities.

In 2022, a need was identified to increase staff proficiency in multimodal communication. One of the strategies chosen was KWS. Education was provided through structured presentations and preparation of materials to educate staff on the importance of multimodal communication with this population, the use of emails, staff meetings, video models, continuing presentations, one-off events and various other options to encourage engagement in learning materials, and data gathering at key points. Surveys were utilised throughout the year to gauge staff’s engagement and opinions, as well as inform future directions.

Results indicated increased frequency and efficiency of KWS use throughout the school by staff and students, increased confidence reported by staff in using KWS and higher levels of enthusiasm organisation-wide for the use of alternate forms of communication.

Our presentation demonstrates the positive shift in opinions, confidence and use of multimodal communication from the perspective of Speech Language Pathologists, other Allied Health professionals and teaching staff. We highlight the importance of strategic planning, incorporating various approaches and the need for continuous improvement in response to feedback and data-collection when attempting to engineer change. The results illustrate the impact a project committed to educating staff can have on implementing organisation-wide change.

1. Small, dedicated project groups given time and resources can enact large changes across an organisation, bringing benefits that will cascade from teaching staff to their students.
2. Teachers and teaching staff surveyed indicate that varied, short but regular methods of education (including weekly emails, competitions, videos, etc.) incorporating an element of fun as well as education, are ideal for optimising sustained engagement.
3. When provided information and education (as outlined in point 2), teaching staff's opinions of multimodal communication strategies and their positive impact in the classroom improved, as did their confidence and abilities in using this strategy successfully.