Analysing narrative productions in older school-age children and adolescents with fetal alcohol syndrome: An experimental tool for clinical applications

Abstract

The most devastating teratogenic effect of alcohol on the unborn child is fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). FAS is a permanent birth defect that results in lifelong disruptions in cognitive, linguistic and social development. One of the most debilitating effects of prenatal alcohol exposure involves the development and use of social communication. Deficits in social communication jeopardize academic success and appear to play a major role in the maladaptive and dysfunctional behaviours present in older school-age children and adolescents with FAS. The ability to manage longer units of social discourse is a defining feature of adolescent language. Narratives are extended texts that occur frequently in the language of the classroom and in a variety of meaningful social contexts. The demands of narratives provide clinicians with a window of opportunity from which to examine the social-communicative processes of youngsters with FAS. In this paper we introduce an experimental protocol that has been designed to sample narrative discourse using a wordless picture book as the eliciting stimulus. Spoken narratives are scored for their cohesion (i.e. linking related events into logical networks) and coherence (i.e. informativeness). The clinical utility of the protocol is demonstrated and discussed, with a case presentation of two adolescents with FAS and a sample of typically developing peers.

Key Words:

• narratives
• adolescents
• school-age children
• assessment
• fetal alcohol syndrome