A comparative macrostructural analysis of narrative discourse in children with typical language development and children with developmental language disorder

Abstract

The aim of this study is to compare the narrative ability of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with typical language development (TLD) using new material for narrative assessment – the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Twenty children with DLD and twenty with TLD, mean age 6.6 years, all monolingual speakers of Croatian, participated in the study. Results demonstrated that children with TLD outperform children with DLD at the macrostructure level in both conditions – story generation and retelling. In addition, the type of elicitation was shown to have an impact on narrative production.