Narrative Skills of Youth with Down Syndrome: a Comprehensive Literature Review

Abstract

Given the role that narratives play in organizing experience, as well as their contribution to social interaction and literacy development, children's narrative skills have received considerable research attention. This paper provides a comprehensive review and thematic analysis of 30 studies conducted over the last three decades on the narrative skills of children and adolescents with Down syndrome. Themes include the global structure of their narratives, narrative comprehension, and use of vocabulary and grammar. The review demonstrates that youth with Down syndrome have basic narrative skills, generally consistent with individuals of the same mental age or language ability, suggesting a delayed rather than an atypical pattern of development. The narrative profile emerging from the review indicates several ways narratives may be facilitated in children and adolescents with Down syndrome. These include a greater focus on personal narratives accompanied by the use of visual supports. The review revealed very few intervention studies, suggesting an important direction for future research.Oral narratives have often been described as a primary and universal way that people organize and make sense of their experience (Polkinghorne 1988; Wells 1986). Indeed, narratives or 'stories' of past, future, or imagined events are ubiquitous in our daily lives; they are present in conversations, ceremonies, books, television, and play, ranging from early pretend to video games. Thus, the ability to understand and tell stories has an important role in social and communicative functioning. Moreover, given that stories are often read aloud by educators in early childhood settings and expected to J Dev Phys Disabil

Mental State Verb Production as a Measure of Perspective Taking in Narrations of Individuals With Down Syndrome

“…As previous investigations have found impaired narrative ability in individuals with DS (overview by Segal and Pesco, 2015), future analyses should include not only MSV production as microstructural ability but also evaluate a connection to macrostructural and overall narrative abilities in this population. These aspects might be important as perspective taking and the understanding of other person's mental states are also reflected in a story's macrostructure, e.g.…”

Narrative Abilities of Adults’ With Down Syndrome as a Window to Their Morphosyntactic, Socio-Cognitive, and Prosodic Abilities

“…Although narrative research has mainly focused on children and adolescents with DS (for a review, see Segal and Pesco, 2015 ), there are some studies which also included adults with DS. Below we report some of the most recent studies in which the experimental procedure or the variables are similar or connected to the ones used in the present study.…”

Exploring Narrative Competence of Persons with Severe Intellectual Disabilities: Insights from Complementary Inclusive Analytic Frameworks

“…The assessment and development of narrative skills is often undertaken in the context of planned interventions to develop language or social skills. Narrative is overwhelmingly defined as a monologue-a stretch of extended discourse with one teller-with the analytic focus on structure and sequence, whether for children, youth, or adults (Hessling & Brimo 2019;Martzoukou, Nousia & Marinis 2020;Segal & Pesco 2015). It is common to apply the framework of "story grammar", originally devised to examine written stories, and derived from the study of European folk tales (Stein & Albro 1997).…”