Oral narrative competence and literacy skills

ABSTRACT

Several studies have demonstrated the role of narrative competence in predicting later academic achievement, but only a few authors tried to highlight exact relationships between the different aspects of these two complex domains. The main aim of the present work was to investigate this association considering the micro- and macrostructural levels of narratives and both the automatism of reading and writing and more complex literacy skills. Participants were 45 Italian children attending the second and third year of primary school. A battery of tasks assessing their narrative, linguistic, and learning abilities was administered. The results partially confirmed the hypothesized associations between narrative macrostructure, in particular information density and the use of psychological lexicon, and ‘higher’ abilities, in particular written text production.

KEYWORDS:

• Narratives
• reading
• school-age children
• writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Paola Zanchi is a postdoctoral research fellow of developmental psychology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan. She has a PhD in Linguistics, Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neurosciences. Her main topic of research is language development. Particularly, she focused her studies on narrative competence in preschoolers and school-age children and on prosodic development.

Laura Zampini is an assistant professor of developmental psychology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan. She has a PhD in Psychology and Cognitive Sciences. Her main research interest is language acquisition in children with typical and atypical development, such as children with genetic syndromes. She is particularly interested in investigating predictive indexes of language development and the relationships between children’s cognitive and linguistic skills.

Mirco Fasolo is associate professor at University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy). He is specialized in the study of the first stages of communicative development (non-verbal, preverbal and verbal communication) in typical and atypical populations (late talkers, Down syndrome, premature born children), as well as in the methodology of developmental psychology.