Oral literal and inferential narrative comprehension in young typically developing children and children with developmental language disorder

Abstract

Purpose: The Squirrel Story Narrative Comprehension Assessment (NCA) was used to investigate the literal and inferential comprehension skills of young typically developing (TD) children aged between 4 and 6 years and to compare the performance of 5-year-old TD children and those with developmental language disorder (DLD).

Method: A total of 132 typically developing children across three age groups between 4 to 6 years (4;0–4;11, 5;0–5;11, 6;0–6;11, years;months), and 94 children with DLD aged 5 years, were assessed using the NCA.

Result: There was a significant increase in both literal and inferential scores for TD children from 4 to 6 years. The TD children aged 4;0 to 4;11 scored significantly lower than the two older age groups for both literal and inferential comprehension, while there was no significant difference between the 5;0 to 5;11 and 6;0 to 6;11 TD groups. The 5;0 to 5;11 TD group scored significantly higher than the age-matched DLD group for literal and inferential comprehension.

Conclusion: The findings indicate that the Squirrel Story NCA is a clinically useful task which is sensitive to developmental improvement in literal and inferential comprehension in young typically developing children and confirm previous research findings of poor narrative comprehension in children with DLD.

Keywords:

• Comprehension
• literal
• inference/inferential
• narrative
• developmental language disorder

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alan Henson and Gillian Baldwin of Black Sheep Press Ltd. for their continued support and for making the Squirrel Story script available for inclusion in the appendix of this article. Some of the data reported in this study were collected as part of doctoral research by Emily Dawes at Curtin University. The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Curtin University and an Australian Government Research Training Programme Scholarship in completing the doctoral research. Thank you to the participants involved in this study.

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2019.1604803.