PURPOSE: to check the capacity of story retelling in children with PDD. METHODS: the sample consisted of four verbal boys, 5 to 10-year old, diagnosed in multidisciplinary team with PDD and attended in the Department of Speech Therapy of the Federal University of São Paulo. For analyzing the linguistic performance, we used the history "The crow and the doves", proposed by Golden, reviewed / adapted by Antunes et. al. This story should be individually reproduced by each child after researcher's narrative. The recount was analyzed in a quantitative way, through the number of reproduced units (14 in the total) correctly by each child. And in a qualitative way, through the observation of the recall of the central themes and presence of distortions. RESULTS: we verified that the number of reproduced items was 7 in average. However, it is interesting to note that nor all units considered central themes had been retold. None of the children made repetition and inversion. CONCLUSION: the results suggest that textual memory ability evidenced by story reproduction is not enough to assure comprehension, because some items are absent in thecentral themes retold by the subjects.
Autistic Disorder; Asperger Syndrome; Memory; Comprehension
