The Moderation of Gender in the Relationship Between Social Cognition and Narrative Language Skills in Autistic Children

The Moderation of Gender in the Relationship Between Social Cognition and Narrative Language Skills in Autistic Children

Compared to males, autistic females often demonstrate a greater desire for social interactions and may imitate peers’ social behaviors, sometimes masking underlying social-cognitive difficulties (Hull et al., 2017; Lai et al., 2015). To better understand these differences, the present study focuses on two key components of social cognition (i.e., affect recognition and theory of mind (ToM)), and their associations with narrative listening comprehension. Gender may act as a moderator, showing variability between these variables; thereby providing a more nuanced view of autism that may inform assessment and screening practices rather than relying on the traditional male-centered research (Harrop et al., 2018). Participants included 34 autistic children between the ages of 3 and 12 years with mean (sd) of 8.73 (2.70) years. Females constituted 31.4% of the sample, males 65.7%. The findings reveal that affect recognition (β = 0.35, p = .227) moderately predicted narrative listening comprehension, while ToM (β = 0.68, p = .002) strongly predicted narrative listening comprehension. When affect recognition (β = 0.09, p = .733) and ToM (β = 0.65, p = .009) were considered simultaneously, only ToM remained significant. Evidence of gender moderating these relations was not detected. This study suggests that ToM may play an important role in the narrative comprehension abilities of autistic children, which is where interventions may focus on to improve this skill (Dore et al., 2018). Implications, limitations, and future directions for these findings will be discussed.