Evaluating the clinical utility of the Profile of Oral Narrative Ability for 4-year-old children

Abstract

This study investigated if the story retelling and comprehension task Ana Gets Lost, that is frequently used with school-aged children, has clinical utility with a preschool population. The study also assessed the task's concurrent and predictive validity with norm-referenced tests of language performance. A total of 92 typically-developing 4-year-old children participated. After 12 months, 57 children were available for a follow-up session. At each session, children listened twice to the story while looking at the pictures and then retold the story without the use of pictures. After the first exposure the children were asked comprehension questions to assess their oral narrative comprehension. Children's performance was analysed on measures of comprehension, narrative quality, semantics, morphosyntax, and verbal productivity to provide a Profile of Oral Narrative Ability (PONA). Results showed normal distribution of some of the measures and acceptable concurrent and predictive correlations with two norm-referenced measures of language ability. Although the results indicate the potential usefulness of this tool with preschool children, further research should investigate its potential as a screening measure of oral narrative performance.

Keywords::

• Oral narrative skills
• preschool children
• language sample analysis
• story retelling
• story comprehension

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the children and the children's kindergarten teachers for their enthusiasm and cooperation. This research was partly supported by a University of Canterbury, College of Education, internal research grant. The support from SALT Software LLC is gratefully acknowledged.