Investigating narrative performance in children with developmental language disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) typically examine narrative performance when completing a comprehensive language assessment. However, there is significant variability in the methodologies used to evaluate narration. The primary aims of this systematic review and meta-analysis were to a) investigate how narrative assessment type (e.g., macrostructure, microstructure, internal state language) differentiates typically developing (TD) children from children with developmental language disorder (DLD), or, TD–DLD group differences, b) identify specific narrative assessment measures (e.g., number of different words) that result in greater TD–DLD differences, and, c) evaluate participant and sample characteristics (e.g., DLD inclusionary criteria) that may uniquely influence performance differences. Method: Three electronic databases (PsychInfo, ERIC, and PubMed) and ASHAWire were searched on July 30, 2019 to locate studies that reported oral narrative language measures for both DLD and TD groups between ages 4 and 12 years; studies focusing on written narration or other developmental disorders only were excluded. Thirty-seven primary studies were identified via a three-step study selection procedure. We extracted data related to the sample participants, the narrative task(s) and assessment measures, and research design. Standardized mean differences using a bias-corrected Hedges’ g were the calculated effect sizes (N = 382). Research questions were analyzed using mixed-effects meta-regression with robust variance estimation to account for effect size dependencies. Results: Searches identified eligible studies published between 1987 and 2019. An overall meta-analysis using 382 effect sizes obtained across 37 studies showed that children with DLD had decreased narrative performance relative to TD peers, with summary estimates ranging from -0.850, 95% CI [-1.016, -0.685] to -0.794, 95% CI [-0.963, -0.624], depending on the correlation assumed. Across all models, effect size estimates showed significant heterogeneity both between and within studies, even after accounting for effect size-, sample-, and study-level predictors. Grammatical accuracy (microstructure) and story grammar (macrostructure) yielded the most consistent evidence of significant TD–DLD group differences across statistical models.Conclusions: Present findings suggest some narrative assessment measures may yield significantly different performance between children with and without DLD. However, researchers need to be consistent in their inclusionary criteria, their description of sample characteristics, and in their reporting of the correlations of measures, in order to determine which assessment measures are more likely to yield group differences.

Narrative Performance and Sociopragmatic Abilities in Preschool Children are Linked to Multimodal Imitation Skills

Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old infants’ early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether multimodal imitation (gestural, prosodic, and lexical components) and object-based imitation are related to narratives and sociopragmatics in preschoolers. Thirty-one typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children performed four tasks to assess multimodal imitation, object-based imitation, narrative abilities, and sociopragmatic abilities. Results revealed that both narrative and sociopragmatic skills were significantly related to multimodal imitation, but not to object-based imitation, indicating that preschoolers’ ability to imitate socially relevant multimodal cues is strongly related to language and sociocommunicative skills. Therefore, this evidence supports a broader conceptualization of imitation behaviors in the field of language development that systematically integrates prosodic, gestural, and verbal linguistic patterns.

A STUDY OF TENSE SHIFT AS A RESOURCE FOR IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

This study focuses on tense variation as linguistic features of narrative performance using Schiffrin’s (1981) theory of tense variation supported by Labov’s (1972) and Ochs and Cap’s (2001) frameworks of narrative structure. It shows that historical present also performs evaluative function and appears in restricted clauses in progressive aspect indicating the overlap on time between two actions. Shifts into narrative past tense also perform an evaluative function and appears in contexts narrating unexpected event within the complication. Generic and nominalising actions are used to express negative evaluation of an opponent based on an earlier premise. These findings can bring new insights into the way politicians construct arguments in self and other presentation since nominalising negative actions implies comparing the self to an external other. This is achieved in association with stance taking and evaluative commentaries provided by politicians as strategies of positive self and negative other presentation. The study provides a detailed analysis of the linguistic features stated earlier in relation to identity construction and self-presentation exemplifying the use of HP

Managing narratives, managing identities: Language and credibility in legal consultations with asylum seekers

This study examines interactional management practices and narrative co-construction in lawyer-asylum seeker consultations in Flanders, Belgium. Drawing upon linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it presents a case study of a consultation between an Afghan applicant for international protection, his adviser, and his lawyer. The purpose of the consultation is to prepare the applicant for testifying at the upcoming asylum hearing. Data analysis focuses on (i) the reorientation of the asylum narrative from an authentic-experiential towards a more objectified formal-institutional account; (ii) the participants’ positioning work that indexes this reorientation process; and (iii) their fluctuating alignment of local-interactional and translocal-gatekeeping perspectives. In the discussion, we analyse the consultation in terms of competing legal and experiential voices and views on participant roles/responsibilities. We reflect on how this ambiguity of roles and ideologies relates to the constructed character of credibility, which reveals the importance of adequate legal assistance in this linguistically challenging context. (Legal consultations, asylum procedure, linguistic ethnography, narrative performance, credibility assessment)*

Contribution of Nonverbal Cognitive Skills on Bilingual Children’s Grammatical Performance: Influence of Exposure, Task Type, and Language of Assessment

This study explores the contribution of nonverbal working memory and processing speed on bilingual children’s morphosyntactic knowledge, after controlling for language exposure. Participants include 307 Spanish–English bilinguals in Kindergarten, second, and fourth grade (mean age = 7;8, SD = 18 months). Morphosyntactic knowledge in English and Spanish was measured using two separate language tasks: a cloze task and a narrative language task. In a series of four hierarchical linear regressions predicting cloze and narrative performance in English and Spanish, we evaluate the proportion of variance explained after adding (a) English exposure, (b) processing speed and working memory, and (c) interaction terms to the model. The results reveal the differential contribution of nonverbal cognitive skills across English and Spanish. Cognition was not significantly related to performance on either grammatical cloze or narrative tasks in Spanish. Narrative tasks in English were significantly predicted by processing speed, after controlling for age and exposure. Grammatical cloze tasks in English posed an additional cognitive demand on working memory. The findings suggest that cognitive demands vary for bilinguals based on the language of assessment and the task.

The Value of Non-Referential Gestures: A Systematic Review of Their Cognitive and Linguistic Effects in Children’s Language Development

Speakers produce both referential gestures, which depict properties of a referent, and non-referential gestures, which lack semantic content. While a large number of studies have demonstrated the cognitive and linguistic benefits of referential gestures as well as their precursor and predictive role in both typically developing (TD) and non-TD children, less is known about non-referential gestures in cognitive and complex linguistic domains, such as narrative development. This paper is a systematic review and narrative synthesis of the research concerned with assessing the effects of non-referential gestures in such domains. A search of the literature turned up 11 studies, collectively involving 898 2- to 8-year-old TD children. Although they yielded contradictory evidence, pointing to the need for further investigations, the results of the six studies–in which experimental tasks and materials were pragmatically based–revealed that non-referential gestures not only enhance information recall and narrative comprehension but also act as predictors and causal mechanisms for narrative performance. This suggests that their bootstrapping role in language development is due to the fact that they have important discourse–pragmatic functions that help frame discourse. These findings should be of particular interest to teachers and future studies could extend their impact to non-TD children.