Narrative Skills

The ability to recount events — real or imagined — as a coherent, temporally ordered, causally linked story that another person can follow. Narrative skills rest on autobiographical memory retrieval, event sequencing, referential clarity (introducing and tracking characters), perspective-taking, and linguistic formulation. They are a well-studied area of difficulty for many autistic children and adolescents, who may produce narratives that are fragmented, overly literal, or short on emotional and contextual detail even when their underlying vocabulary and grammar are age-typical. Because narrative skills underpin friendship formation, classroom participation, and self-advocacy, they are a frequent target of speech-language therapy, social-skills interventions, and, increasingly, AI-assisted journaling and storytelling tools.