Story grammar elements and causal relations in the narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children with SLI and typical language development

Narrative Skills of Monolingual and Bilingual Pre-School and Primary School Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD): A Systematic Review

“…Various studies using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, (Gagarina et al, 2015) confirmed previous results on similar macro-level abilities in monolingual and bilingual children regardless of their language abilities while micro-structure often distinguished bilingual children with TLD from those with DLD (Boerma, Leseman, Timmermeister, Wijnen, & Blom, 2016). A recent study with Russian-Hebrew bilinguals revealed that a more detailed macro-structural analysis that includes story grammar elements and causal relations was effective in distinguishing bilinguals with TLD and DLD (Fichman, Altman, Voloskovich, Armon-Lotem, & Walters, 2017).…”

The effect of picture support on narrative retells in Swedish adolescents with ADHD

“…Many narrative studies including children and adolescents with ADHD have focused on macrostructural measures (Lorch et al, 2010;Luo & Timler, 2008;Papaeliou et al, 2015;Tannock et al, 1993), including the overarching structural organization of story content, and sometimes also other aspects of story content (see e.g., Manolitsi & Botting, 2011). The overall structure of narrative content is often described in terms of Story grammar (Stein & Glenn, 1979) which outlines the main elements of a well-formed story, and includes sequential and causal relationships within stories (Fichman et al, 2017;Trabasso & Sperry, 1985). Story grammar consists of the general introduction (the setting) and the episode which includes initiating event, the character´s internal response to this event, the character´s plan, an attempt to solve the problem, the consequence produced by the attempt, and the character ´s reaction to the consequence (Hughes et al, 1997;Stein & Glenn, 1979).…”

The linguistic expression of causal relations in picture-based narratives: A comparative study of bilingual and monolingual children with TLD and DLD

“…It is expected that language ability, measures of language proficiency and bilingual experience will impact the occurrence of causal relations between the episodic components more than language background at the group level (Fichman et al, 2017; Kupersmitt et al, 2014). For the array of linguistic forms, monolinguals with TLD are predicted to perform better than the rest of the groups at the clausal level, particularly in the lexical domain.…”

“…To refine the analysis, Altman, Armon-Lotem, Fichman, and Walters (2016) added an exploration of mental state terms, claiming that cognitive mental terms (e.g., know, decide, think ) distinguished between TLD and DLD children in their home language (HL) and school language (SL) narratives, a finding replicated in Tsimpli, Peristeri, and Andreou (2016) with bilingual speakers of Greek as the SL. A recent study with Russian–Hebrew bilinguals showed that a more detailed macro-structural analysis that includes story grammar elements and causal relations was effective in distinguishing bilinguals with TLD and DLD (Fichman, Altman, Voloskovich, Armon-Lotem, & Walters, 2017). These studies provide valuable information about the linguistic and cognitive-related abilities of children, but fail to examine the use of language forms for the purposes that are intrinsically constrained by the type of discourse that children are producing, i.e., ‘the purposes of constructing a text that is cohesive and coherent at all levels: within the clause, between adjacent clauses, and hierarchically relating larger text segments to one another’ (Berman & Slobin, 1994, p. 4).…”