Fictional narrative as a window to discourse development: a psycholinguistic approach

Abstract

The article presents a complex experimental study in narrative production in Russian-speaking typically-developing (TD) and specifically language-impaired (SLI) preschoolers'. Following a methodology of dynamic approach to narrative assessment, the data (video-/audio-recordings) of both story-telling and retelling according to a wordless picture sequence was collected. All the stories were transcribed and encoded for an automatized linguistic analysis. Then, statistical analysis was employed and the results of TD and SLI children were evaluated and compared, taking into consideration the following aspects: individual measures of narrative macrostructure (story structure, episode completeness, and internal state terms), microstructure (story productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity), linguistic dysfluencies (hesitations, repetitions, revisions, false starts, and incomplete utterances), and grammatical, lexical, and stylistic errors. Moreover, the impact of such factors as session (Iя vs. 2"d), story complexity, and mode (telling vs. retelling) on the dynamics of narrative structure and language was evaluated. Our results point to the importance of multidimensional approach to measuring resources for fictional narrative analysis. In the SLI group, narrative macrostructure tended to be significantly more sensitive to such variables as session and mode, while such a tendency was not observed in the TD group; as for narrative microstructure, SLI children also produced significandy shorter utterances and fewer verbs per utterance than their TD peers; moreover, in the SLI group, narrative language highly interacted with narrative structure. Although the total number of linguistic disfluencies was equal between the groups, some specific types of disfluencies (unfilled hesitations and incomplete utterances) were more frequent in the SLI group; [...]