The development of narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children aged 4 to 9: a longitudinal study

Sharing Stories Versus Explaining Facts: Comparing African American Children's Microstructure Performance Across Fictional Narrative, Informational, and Procedural Discourse

PURPOSE

Both fictional oral narrative and expository oral discourse skills are critical language competencies that support children's academic success. Few studies, however, have examined African American children's microstructure performance across these genres. To address this gap in the literature, the study compared African American children's microstructure productivity and complexity across three discourse contexts: fictional narratives, informational discourse, and procedural discourse. The study also examined whether there were age-related differences in microstructure performance by discourse type.

METHOD

Participants were 130 typically developing African American children, aged 59-95 months old, enrolled in kindergarten through second grades in a Midwestern U.S. public school district. Wordless children's books were used to elicit fictional narratives, informational, and procedural discourse. Indicators of microstructure performance included measures of productivity (i.e., number of total words and number of different words) and complexity (i.e., mean length of communication unit and complex syntax rate). The effects of genre and age on microstructure performance were assessed using linear mixed-effects regression models.

RESULTS

Children produced longer discourse and used a greater diversity of words for their fictional stories compared to their informational or procedural discourse. Grammatical complexity was greater for fictional narratives and procedural discourse than informational discourse. Results showed greater productivity and complexity among older children compared to younger children, particularly for fictional and informational discourse.

CONCLUSIONS

African American children exhibit variation in their microstructure performance by discourse context and age. Understanding this variation is key to providing African American children with support to maximize their oral language competencies.

Becoming fictional storytellers: African American children's oral narrative development in early elementary school

Oral storytelling skills are a complex oral discourse competency with implications for children's academic and social well-being, yet few studies have investigated the development of these skills among typically developing African American children. The current study used longitudinal data, collected between 2012 and 2013, from 130 African American children (59-95 months old; 66 girls) to explore the development of fictional oral narrative skills. Results showed growth in macrostructure (i.e., story grammar) and microstructure productivity (i.e., number of total words; number of different words) over the school year. There was no evidence of growth in microstructure complexity. Nonverbal cognitive skills emerged as an individual difference in predicting oral narrative production. This study contributes to increasing the knowledge base needed to support African American children's oral language development.

Narrative skills and language comprehension in preschool children with cochlear implants: A comparison with children with Developmental Language Disorder or typical development

INTRODUCTION

The narrative skills of children with cochlear implants (CIs) are fragile, but the factors at play and whether these difficulties could be similar to those detected in language impairment are not clear. The present study aims to assess, at the microstructural level, narrative skills, comparing children with CIs with children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or Typical Development (TD). Furthermore, the relationship between verbal (lexical and morphosyntactic) comprehension and narrative skills across groups is investigated.

METHODS

The narratives of 19 children with CIs (Mage = 62.42 months, SD = 6.83), 13 children with DLD (Mage = 65.38 months, SD = 4.27), and 18 preschool children with TD (Mage = 63.67 months, SD = 4.31) were assessed in a standardized task. Articles, prepositions, pronouns, gender and number agreement, accuracy in the use of verbs, and number of arguments in each sentence were analysed. Lexical and morphosyntactic comprehension were also assessed. Performance was compared across groups using ANOVAs or Kruskal-Wallis tests. The role of lexical and morphosyntactic comprehension in predicting each morphological and syntactic element in the narrative task was examined using linear regressions.

RESULTS

Data analysis showed that both children with CIs and DLD had fragilities in narration, both in the morphological and syntactic components. Although some differences between children with CIs and those with DLD emerged in descriptive analyses, these were not statistically significant. Regressions showed that morphosyntactic comprehension predicted the number of pronouns produced only in the TD group.

CONCLUSIONS

The scarce differences between CI and DLD groups and the absence of an effect of morphosyntactic comprehension on pronoun production may be due to their low production of these elements in the narrative task and/or to a difficulty in managing pronouns in an expressive task regardless of their ability to comprehend them. Potential implications of these results are discussed.

The Effect of Age and Task Complexity on the Microstructure of Child Arabic Narratives

PURPOSE

This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features.

METHOD

This study employed a cross-sectional research design and enrolled 96 monolingual speakers of Kuwaiti Arabic. Four groups of children aged 4;0-7;11 (years;months) were randomly recruited from public schools across Kuwait. The groups consisted of 22 four-year-olds (Kindergarten 1), 24 five-year-olds (Kindergarten 2), 25 six-year-olds (Grade 1), and 25 seven-year-olds (Grade 2). Two sets of sequential pictures from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument were used to elicit storytelling from all participants: a one-episode story and a more complex three-episode story.

RESULTS

The children's stories were analyzed to determine if there were differences in narrative microstructure as a function of age and task complexity. The data indicated that productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic structures increased with task complexity. The length of communication units, the average mean length of the three longest utterances, and the amount and variety of words in the children's productions were all significantly larger in the more complex story. Only one syntactic structure showed age as well as task effects.

CONCLUSION

Clinical recommendations include adapting the coding scheme to fit Arabic data, using the more complex narrative alone for microstructure analysis, and calculating only a few measures for productivity and syntactic complexity to save time.