Performance of children with social communication disorder on the Happé Strange Stories: Physical and mental state responses and relationship to language ability.
This study investigated whether a modified scoring method was useful for examining the ability of children with social communication disorder (CwSCD) to understand non-literal language and use mental state responses on the Happé Strange Stories (HSS) task. CwSCD and a control group of children with typical language development (CwTLD) completed 10 of the original HSS. CwSCD scored significantly lower on the HSS task than did CwTLD and were much less likely to produce mental state responses. There was a high level of inter-rater reliability (Weighted Kappa=0.907) across data from both groups. HSS performance and language ability correlated significantly for CwSCD. A regression model with age, nonverbal intelligence, receptive and expressive language as predictors explained 55.2% of the variance in HSS ability for CwSCD. The results suggest that the HSS have potential to be used as a clinical assessment to investigate high-level language and ability to infer intent in CwSCD.


OBJECTIVE
Readers will be able to describe a modified scoring method for the Happé Strange Stories task. Readers will be able to identify areas of impairment for children with social communication disorder. Readers will identify how these areas of impairment have an effect on ability to understand non-literal language and produce mental state responses on the Happé Strange Stories task.
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Electronic address: Jenny.Freed@Manchester.ac.uk.
Jenny
J
Freed
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Kirsty
K
McBean
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Catherine
C
Adams
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Elaine
E
Lockton
Speech and Language Therapy Department, Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh, UK.
Marysia
M
Nash
Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University, St Thomas Street, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne NE1 7RU, UK.
James
J
Law
D002648:Child; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011581:Psychological Tests; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D000067404:Social Communication Disorder / Q000523:psychology*
Happé Strange Stories; Pragmatic language impairment; Social communication disorder