“But I first… and then he kept picking”

Abstract

This study investigates the narrative skill of school-aged children with language impairment in Taiwan. Twelve children, 6 children with language impairment (LI) and 6 children with typical language development (TLD), aged from 8;0 to 9;5 participated in this study. They were asked to tell three personally experienced stories and the longest one was selected and coded along four dimensions, i.e., narrative structure, conjunction, referential strategies, and discourse context. The revision of the Chinese Narrative Assessment Profile (NAP) was also used to score children’s narrative performance. Results show that the children with LI had more difficulties in producing clear, coherent narratives. In comparison with the stories narrated by children with TLD, the stories produced by children with LI exhibited fewer narrative components, evaluation devices, and connectives, but more ambiguous referencing information was evident in their narratives. The narrative profile of each child with LI, however, varied. Limitations of this study and suggestions for further research on narrative skill in children with LI were provided.

A Narrative Evaluation of Mandarin-Speaking Children With Language Impairment

“…The group with LI produced fewer macrostructure elements (e.g., actions, settings) and exhibited lower usage of various expressions of internal state than the TD matches. Likewise, Tsai and Chang (2008) observed deficits in macrostructure in six Mandarin-speaking children with LI at 8 to 9 years old when compared to age matches. In addition, they found that general microstructure measures revealed group differences, including word productivity (i.e., TNW), lexical diversity (i.e., NDW), and syntactic complexity (i.e., MLU; Tsai & Chang, 2008).…”

“…The likelihood of finding grammatical errors may be smaller in a narrative context in which children have much flexibility in choosing language expressions. In the following, we will review the three Mandarin narrative studies (Cheung, 2009;Tsai & Chang, 2008;Zhang, 2009) and see what differentiating measures have been found in Mandarin. Zhang (2009) compared two 4-year-old children with LI and their age matches.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, only three studies (Cheung, 2009;Tsai & Chang, 2008;Zhang, 2009) evaluated narrative production in Mandarin-speaking children with LI. All of them had very small sample sizes (n ≤ 6).…”

Who Does What to Whom: Introduction of Referents in Children’s Storytelling From Pictures

“…These studies found differences on referential adequacy (RA) scores between children with and without LI (and Down syndrome in the case of Boudreau & Chapman, 2000). This method of analyzing referential cohesion is commonly used in research on TD children (Hickmann, 1991;Hickmann, Hendriks, Roland, & Jiang, 1996;Schneider & Dubé, 1997;Tsai & Chang, 2008). Using this method, any referring expression that is not fully adequate for its occurrence in a story is considered inadequate, and the percentage of RA is calculated as the number of adequate referring expressions divided by the total number of referring expressions.…”

The effectiveness of Colourful Semantics on narrative skills in children with intellectual disabilities in Sri Lanka

“…Narrative skills are strongly associated with our conceptual and language development (Morrow, 1985;Vygotsky, 1962), connected to later literacy proficiency and academic achievement (Bishop and Edmundson, 1987;Boudreau and Hedberg, 1999;Chang, 2006;Hedberg and Westby, 1993;Westby, 1984;Wetherell et al, 2007) and socialization skills (Wetherell et al, 2007). Children experiencing language-learning difficulties are particularly susceptible to difficulties with the production of coherent and lucid narratives (Botting, 2002;Norbury and Bishop, 2003;Reilly et al, 2004;Tsai and Chang, 2008). They encounter particular difficulties with organizing stories and in using relevant vocabulary and suitable syntactic structures when generating narratives (Boudreau and Hedberg, 1999;Pearce et al, 2003;Reilly et al, 2004).…”