Exploring Gender Differences in ADHD through Narrative Competency
Open Access
- Author:
- Smith, Grace
- Area of Honors:
- Linguistics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Diane L Williams, Thesis Supervisor
Michael Travis Putnam, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- ADHD
gender
narrative competency
narrative
pragmatic language
pragmatics
young adults
executive function - Abstract:
- Individuals affected by Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often present with pragmatic language impairment. While not unanimous, existing literature on narrative language use generally provides evidence of a relationship between ADHD and narrative impairment. However, despite the large body of work studying ADHD and language, very little of it focuses on adults. Additionally, there is only a small (but increasing) data pool describing the effect of gender on ADHD symptomatology. The present study explores whether young adults with ADHD have less cohesive and coherent narratives than young adults without ADHD, and whether there is a gender component to narrative competence. Three prompt-driven narratives were collected from four groups of three people each: Clinical women (i.e. women with ADHD), clinical men, non-clinical women, and non-clinical men, and analyzed in domains of narrative competency. Because these are largely mental organizational/executive functioning (EF) skills, study activities were designed to ensure participants were genuinely challenged in those areas. In the opinion of the investigators, activities used in prior research such as story retelling or other highly structured narrative tasks may mask deficits due to an insufficient EF load placed on the narrator. EF measures were also collected from participants using the Executive Skills Questionnaire (ESQ). Young adults with ADHD were found to have less competent narratives than young adults without ADHD. Gender did not have an overall effect on narrative competency, but did play a role when combined with clinical status. Finally, speakers who reported higher difficulty with executive functioning produced less competent narratives with more production errors. Understanding how ADHD affects narrative abilities can enhance understanding of ADHD’s effect on areas such as executive function, social interaction, and language use for spoken discourse.