Narrative analysis as the SLI assessment tool: evidences from Russian-speaking preschoolers

Abstract

The paper deals with micro- and macrostructural characteristics in Russian-speaking language impaired preschool children and their typically developing peers. The study was based on experimental data that includes story telling and retelling according word-less picture sequence. During the analysis, individual measures of story structure, structural complexity, internal state terms, story productivity, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity as well as percentage of linguistic dysfluencies and errors were evaluated and between the samples. Moreover, impact of such factors as session (1st vs. 2nd), story complexity and mode (telling vs. retelling) on dynamics of narrative structure and language was evaluated. Our results highlithed essential dynamic differences between the samples from the perspective of narrative structure, structural complexity, grammaticality, and vocabulary.