<B>"But I first... and then he kept picking"</B><BR> Narrative skill in Mandarin-speaking children with language impairment

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.

Can connective use differentiate between children with and without specific language impairment?

“…This result is perfectly explicable within the cumulative conceptual complexity approach to connective acquisition, claiming that causal relations are among the most complex coherence relations, which leads to a relatively late acquisition of causal connectives in typical language development (Evers-Vermeul & Sanders, 2009; Spooren & Sanders, 2008). The finding that children with SLI have trouble adequately expressing causal relations by means of i and a is also compatible with the observation that language-impaired individuals avoid using causal connectives and over-rely on less complex (additive and sequential) connectives for maintaining discourse coherence (Befi-Lopes et al, 2008; Gagarina, 2012b; Tsai & Chang, 2008). Thus, semantic analyses of connective use in children’s discourse are not only informative about differences between impaired and unimpaired populations, but also shed light on the quantitative patterns reported in the literature (e.g.…”

“…More specifically, studies targeting relational coherence in the narratives of language-impaired individuals have compared overall frequencies of connectives in the speech of children with and without SLI, sometimes distinguishing between additive, temporal and causal connectives. The findings were rather controversial: some studies report no differences between the groups in overall connective frequencies (Baltaxe & D’Angiola, 1992; Liles, 1985a, 1985b), whereas others found under-use of causal and temporal connectives and over-reliance on less complex additives in the narratives produced by children with language impairment (Befi-Lopes et al, 2008; Gagarina, 2012b; Tsai & Chang, 2008). Additionally, several papers report relatively high rates of erroneous connectives by children with SLI (e.g.…”

“…In contrast, Gagarina (2012b) reports over-use of the additive connectives i ‘and’ and a ‘and/but’ by Russian-speaking 5-year-olds with SLI. Tsai and Chang (2008) show that Mandarin-speaking language-impaired children (aged 7–10) under-use temporal and causal connectives and over-rely on sequential connectives (‘and then’). Likewise, Befi-Lopes, Bento, and Perissinoto (2008) demonstrate that language-impaired children have difficulty expressing causal relations and compensate by ample use of additive connectives.…”

“…There is some indication that language-impaired children have difficulty producing coherent discourse, as evidenced, for instance, by poorer cohesion of their narratives (e.g. Gonsalez, Cáceres, Bento-Gaz, & Befi-Lopes, 2012; Liles, 1985a, 1985b; Norbury, Gemmel, & Paul, 2014; Tsai & Chang, 2008). However, studies addressing these issues are typically restricted to counting overall frequencies of cohesive markers.…”

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).…”