Narrative retells in Swedish school-aged children – a clinical pilot study

Abstract

Aim

The aim of this pilot study was to evaluate two new retelling tasks intended for clinical use in terms of language sample size, effects of picture support, and order of presentation.

Methods

Forty Swedish-speaking children in grades 4–6 participated in the study, 31 children with typical language development (TLD, mean age 11;1), and nine children with developmental language disorder (DLD, mean age 11;5). Two oral retells, one with and one without picture support, were analyzed with regards to productivity, syntactic complexity, basic Story Grammar (SG) units, and Internal Responses (IR).

Results

Results showed no systematic order effects in the TLD group, although this needs to be investigated further, and good inter-rater reliability. Both tasks elicited sufficiently large language samples, except from one participant with DLD whose samples were excluded from subsequent comparisons. When appropriate, data were analyzed with ANOVA (productivity, mean length of C-unit/MLCU), otherwise t-tests (TLD-group) or non-parametric tests (DLD-group) were used. As expected, retells from participants with DLD were shorter, with shorter MLCU and fewer SG units compared to the TLD group. There were also task effects: in the task with picture support, all participants had longer MLCU, and participants with TLD also showed a higher proportion of subordinate clauses, indicating that pictures may function as a support for syntactic complexity. The task without picture support, on the other hand, elicited more C-units indicated by a significant main effect, and more SG units, which was a significant effect in the TLD group.

Conclusions

>We conclude that both tasks might be useful for Swedish speech-language pathologists.

Keywords:

• Narrative
• developmental language disorder
• task effects
• school-age
• assessment

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the participating schools, clinics, parents, and children. We also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped improve and clarify this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interests.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elin Hällström

Elin Hällström, has a Degree of Master in Speech Language Pathology from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. She is currently a doctoral student in Engineering Psychology at the Department of Health, Education and Technology, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden.

Jenny Myr

Jenny Myr has a Degree of Master in Speech Language Pathology from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden and work as a school based SLP at the Stockholm International Academy Häggvik, Sollentuna, Sweden.

Anna Eva Hallin

Dr. Anna Eva Hallinis an Assistant Professor in Speech Language Pathology at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research focuses on language and literacy development and disorders.