engleski

Story structure in Croatian typically developing children and children with specic language impairment

The narrative discourse production is developmentally first and most frequent pragmatic ability in preschool children that is in positive correlation with child later academic achievement. Therefore, it is important to enable assessment of narrative abilities of children prior to school. It is also crucial to validate if the assessment of narrative production is a proper method for differentiating typically developing children from children with language impairment. The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of narrative type on story structure in children with specific language impairment (further SLI) and children with typical language development (further TLD) and to analyse differences in the story structure between groups according to the two different narrative measures. . The sample of Croatian speaking monolingual children consisted of two groups, SLI (n=20) and TDL (n=20). Age range of children was 5 ; 6 to 7 ; 6. Children were asked to tell two narratives elicited by two different methods: 1. telling, based on the sequence of six pictures ; 2. retelling, based on the oral model of the story and the sequence of six pictures. Pictures and sounds of the story were presented on a computer screen. During the narration children were audio-taped and narratives were transcribed. The story grammar analysis was then conducted in accordance with the story grammar model created in project Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society (BI-SLI, COST ISO804 – further BI-SLI). Results have shown that TLD children were significantly better on both narrative measures than their SLI counterparts. In TLD group there were no significant differences between the story structures on two different measures. The story structure in SLI group was significantly better on retelling than telling. Therefore, influence of the narrative type was evident in SLI group. Results of the present study have shown that retelling is not a better discriminator of SLI than telling. However, larger sample would be needed in order to make conclusions about the whole SLI population.

narratives; specific language impairment; story structure; elicitation type

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