The chapter presents our findings on a complex experimental comparative study of the narrative analysis of language-impaired and typically-developing monolingual Russian children. The data of storytelling and retelling according to wordless picture sequences were collected from specifically language-impaired preschoolers, dyslexic school-age children, and typically-developing peers. Then, following the methodology of the dynamic approach to narrative assessment, an impact of such factors as session, story complexity, and story mode on the measures of narrative macrostructure, microstructure, linguistic dysfluency, and language errors was estimated. The study provides evidence that the given extralinguistic factors significantly influence the narrative measures; namely, the language-impaired children, contrary to the typically-developing peers, tended to be significantly sensitive to the experiment session and the story mode.

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.