Beyond assessing language skills in standardized contexts, recent research has focused on understanding how children exposed to alcohol prenatally use language to achieve communicative goals and conceptualize their social environment. Findings suggest that in social interactions, children with FASD struggle to balance linguistic and social-cognitive task demands in order to produce contextually integrated discourse (Coggins, Olswang, Carmichael Olson, & Timler, 2003). They provide insufficient organization and information for listeners in narratives (Coggins, Timler, & Olswang, 2007) and, according to caregiver reports, fail to consider the perspective of the listener during interaction (Timler, Olswang, & Coggins, 2005). Using narrative analysis, one study examined semantic elaboration and strategic use of linguistic references to identify concepts in a group of children prenatally exposed to alcohol. Both normal controls and alcohol-exposed children varied in their extent of semantic elaboration in narrative telling, but children with FASD were significantly more likely to use ambiguous references and inappropriately distinguish concepts in their stories (Thorne, Coggins, Carmichael Olson, & Astley, 2007).
