Doing new things with language: Narrative language in SLI preschoolers

Abstract

The paper deals with micro- and macrostructural static and dynamic narrative characteristics in specifically language-impaired (SLI) Russian-speaking preschool children and their typically-developing (TD) peers. The study was based on experimental data that included storytelling and retelling elicited by means of wordless picture sequences. First, individual measures of story structure, episode completeness, internal state terms, story productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity, as well as the percentage of linguistic dysfluencies and errors, were evaluated and compared between the experimental and control groups. Second, the impact of such factors as session (1st vs. 2nd), story complexity, and mode (telling vs. retelling) on the dynamic variation of micro- and macrostructural narrative measures was evaluated. Our results highlighted essential dynamic differences between the samples from the perspective of narrative structure, structural complexity, grammaticality, and vocabulary.