The study examines macro- and microstructural characteristics of narrative production in Lithuanian as the first language of a group of Lithuanian-English sequential young (mean age 6;1) bilinguals (n = 12) living in the UK; the control group of monolingual Lithuanian children (n = 12) residing in Lithuania was tested as well. Monolingual children demonstrated greater vocabulary diversity and used a wider range of syntactic devices to create story cohesion than the bilinguals, although general story length (words, utterances, communication units) was higher in the bilingual group. The results point to specific aspects of language that may be difficult for children to acquire without formal education in Lithuanian. We speculate that the advantage in story length for bilingual speakers might be attributed to a greater emphasis on oral narratives within the UK educational system.

Development of narrative competence, i.e. transition from personal to fiction stories, bridges the gap between child’s mimetic mind and mediational mind (Nelson 1996) and serves as a primary background for early literacy prerequisites (McCabe 1996). Internal state terms (ISTs), an integral part of narrative macrostructure, take part in mentalisation of human behavior and development of literate style that forms a crucial aspect of school-based discourse (Pearson 2002; Curenton & Justice 2004). This is extremely important for diagnosis and treatment of literacy impairments; however, ISTs in atypical populations still lack comprehensive studies. The present study focuses on differences between dyslexic (DY) and typicallydeveloping (TD) children with respect to production of ISTs in story-telling and retelling. The subjects of the experiment were 12 Russian-speaking monolingual DY children (mean age 9 years 9 months); the control group consisted of 12 Russianspeaking monolingual TD peers. The subjects performed two tasks, i.e. story-telling and retelling according picture sequences. The order of tasks was counterbalanced with regard to story complexity and narrative mode. First, storytelling according the more complex sequence in 1st session revealed a gap between the groups: the DYs tended to use less (P<0.08) ISTs than the TDs. Second, Anova analysis highlighted significant effect of story complexity, narrative mode, and order of tasks on the ISTs production in the DY group; among these factors, the order of tasks seems to have the strongest influence. The results of the study call for discussion on significant limitations in the DY children’s mentalisation of narrative protagonists’ behavior.

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.

The paper presents the methodology of narrative elicitation of dyslexic children. The experiment was conducted in Saint Petersburg (Russia) testing 9–10 year old children. The experimental group consisted of 12 children with dyslexia, and a control group contained 12 peers without any developmental disorders. Each of the subjects performed two tasks: storytelling according to a picture sequence and retelling another picture sequence. The narrative elicitation procedure was controlled from the perspective of story complexity, task order and story mode. The descriptive statistical analysis evaluated the impact of particular types of narrative elicitation on a quality of narrative in the experimental and control groups. A statistically significant difference of the impact of task order, narrative mode, and story complexity on the narrative of dyslexic children encourages to study the methodology of narrative analysis even more comprehensively and be especially careful in selecting visual stimuli for populations with atypical language development.