Explicit Oral Narrative Intervention for Students with Williams Syndrome

Abstract

Narrative skills play a crucial role in organizing experience, facilitating social interaction and building academic discourse and literacy. They are at the interface of cognitive, social, and linguistic abilities related to school engagement. Despite their relative strengths in social and grammatical skills, students with Williams syndrome (WS) do not show parallel cognitive and pragmatic performance in narrative generation tasks. The aim of the present study was to assess retelling of a TV cartoon tale and the effect of an individualized explicit instruction of the narrative structure. Participants included eight students with WS who attended different special education levels. Narratives were elicited in two sessions (pre and post intervention), and were transcribed, coded and analyzed using the tools of the CHILDES Project. Narratives were coded for productivity and complexity at the microstructure and macrostructure levels. Microstructure productivity (i.e., length of narratives) included number of utterances, clauses, and tokens. Microstructure complexity included mean length of utterances, lexical diversity and use of discourse markers as cohesive devices. Narrative macrostructure was assessed for textual coherence through the Pragmatic Evaluation Protocol for Speech Corpora (PREP-CORP). Macrostructure productivity and complexity included, respectively, the recall and sequential order of scenarios, episodes, events and characters. A total of four intervention sessions, lasting approximately 20 min, were delivered individually once a week. This brief intervention addressed explicit instruction about the narrative structure and the use of specific discourse markers to improve cohesion of story retellings. Intervention strategies included verbal scaffolding and modeling, conversational context for retelling the story and visual support with pictures printed from the cartoon. Results showed significant changes in WS students’ retelling of the story, both at macro- and microstructure levels, when assessed following a 2-week interval. Outcomes were better in microstructure than in macrostructure, where sequential order (i.e., complexity) did not show significant improvement. These findings are consistent with previous research supporting the use of explicit oral narrative intervention with participants who are at risk of school failure due to communication impairments. Discussion focuses on how assessment and explicit instruction of narrative skills might contribute to effective intervention programs enhancing school engagement in WS students.

Narrowing the Genetic Causes of Language Dysfunction in the 1q21.1 Microduplication Syndrome

“…Thus, we first tagged the linguistic errors made by the child indicating the linguistic components affected (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexical semantics). Then we evaluated the communicative effects of each error and labelled it accordingly on the pragmatic level, using the Pragmatic Evaluation Protocol for the analysis of oral Corpora (PREP-CORP), which has been satisfactorily used to provide the linguistic profile of other neurogenic disorders ( 15 – 17 ). The number of occurrences of each labeled phenomenon was automatically computed by means of CLAN ( Computerized Language Analysis ) ( 18 ), allowing us to build up a global description of the pragmatic linguistic profile of the proband, that is to say, of the most salient phenomena of his language in use.…”

Language Impairment with a Partial Duplication of DOCK8

“…Hence, we first tagged the child's errors, with an indication of their nature (phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical ). Afterward, we determined their impact on communication and labeled them according to PREP-CORP (Pragmatic Evaluation Protocol for the analysis of oral CORPpora), which has been previously used for obtaining the pragmatic profile of other developmental disorders [Fernández-Urquiza et al, 2015Shiro et al, 2016;Diez-Itza et al, 2017]. Last, a global description of the pragmatic linguistic profile of the Language with a Duplication of DOCK8…”

Language impairment with a microduplication in 1q42.3q43

“…Because functional approaches to language impairment demand taking into account the pragmatic consequences of structural errors, we first tagged structural errors and then evaluated their communicative effects using the "Pragmatic Evaluation Protocol of Corpora" (PREP-CORP). This protocol has been satisfactorily used to provide the pragmatic profiles of diverse neurodevelopmental disorders (Fernández-Urquiza et al, 2015, Fernández-Urquiza et al, 2017, Diez-Itza et al, 2018. Finally, a whole pragmatic profile of the proband was built up.…”