The effect of a shared visual context during the presentation of elicitation stimuli on the narratives of young children with and without language impairment

Abstract

This study aims to ascertain whether a shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment influences the narratives produced by the children. Participants were 20 typically developing (TD) children and 10 children with language impairment (LI), aged 6 to 8 years. They were randomly assigned to two groups and assessed with two different presentation methods. Narrative performance was measured in terms of micro- and macrostructure. Microstructural variables included productivity (total number of words, total number of T-units), syntactic complexity (mean length of T-unit) and lexical diversity measures (total number of different words, number of internal state terms). Macrostructural variables included cohesion measures (number of complete, incomplete and error ties) and story structure scores measured by the Afrikaans translation (Klop, Visser and Oosthuizen 2012a) of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings-Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives© (LITMUS-MAIN) (Gagarina et al. 2012). Both presentation methods elicited narratives of similar quality in terms of the micro- and macrostructural variables in all the groups. A shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment therefore did not influence the narratives produced by children with LI and TD children.