Narrative Discourse in Children With Language Disorders and Children With Normal Language

Abstract

This review and analysis of the literature on narrative discourse in children places particular emphasis on children with language disorder. The review (a) describes theoretical perspectives on narrative use, (b) surveys researchers’ rationales for the investigation of narrative ability, (c) discusses methodological issues relevant to narrative research, and (d) concludes with a discussion regarding future research. Specific topics contained within these discussions include contributions from allied disciplines, the pragmatic nature of narrative use, narrative ability as an index of language development, methodological issues in research design, and clinical implications of future research.

Impact of Prematurity on Language Skills at School Age

“…In the literature on language development in school-aged children, it is often proposed that narrative tasks are more difficult for children than simple conversations (Liles, 1993;Scott & Windsor, 2000). Consequently, one possible outcome for these data was a wider divergence between groups at HV5, when the task changed from a child-directed conversation to an examinerdirected narrative.…”

Narrative in adolescent specific language impairment (SLI): a comparison with peers across two different narrative genres

“…With increased age (some might argue with increased experience), narratives of all types tend to be longer and more complex both syntactically and episodically and include greater information about emotions (Bamberg and Damrad-Frye, 1991;Liles, 1987Liles, , 1993Westby, 1984). A recent study by Berman and Nir-Sagiv (2004) sought to examine the effect of genre in typically developing children.…”

“…Based on Liles (1993) and numerous other studies showing that younger children with SLI find narrative more difficult than peers (e.g., Reilly et al, 2003), it was predicted that: 1) adolescents with SLI would show impoverished narratives in all areas: productivity, syntactic complexity and syntactic errors, and performance; Furthermore given that research has shown an effect of genre even within story-telling paradigms (e.g., Botting, 2002) it was predicted that 2) the type of narrative would affect results: Story telling was predicted to be more difficult than spontaneous conversational narrative for both groups and following Reilly et al (2003) that 3) the frequency and type of errors made would differ between the SLI and TD groups.…”

The effect of two different visual presentation modalities on the narratives of mainstream grade 3 children

“…Research has shown that both the comprehension and production of narratives can be influenced by a number of aspects, e.g. the elicitation context (structured or unstructured), story genre (story retellings or story generation or personal stories), narrative themes, the child's experiences and world knowledge, the presentation modality (audio, visual or combined audiovisual input), and the familiarity of the listener (Gazella & Stockman, 2003;Liles, 1993).…”

“…The assessment of children's narratives can provide valuable information not only about their speech-language skills, but also about their cognitive, pragmatic and social abilities (Liles, 1993). It is no surprise that narrative abilities are linked to academic success.…”