This early-stage feasibility study investigated the effects of a multitiered oral narrative language intervention on oral language, reading comprehension, and writing. Twenty-eight second-grade students participated in this quasi-experimental control group study with assignment at the classroom level. The independent variable was large- and…

We examined whether the cognitive interview (CI) procedure enhanced the coherence of narrative accounts provided by children with and without intellectual disabilities (ID), matched on chronological age. Children watched a videotaped magic show; one day later, they were interviewed using the CI or a structured interview (SI). Children interviewed…

This study investigated differences in the structure of stories created by children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and their comparison peers. Children created one story without pictorial cues and one with pictorial cues available. Without cues, children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder told fewer stories based on a…

Purpose: This study examined the macrostructure in Estonian children's narratives according to the story grammar (SG) model. The study's aims were to determine whether differences exist in narrative macrostructure between Estonian- and English-speaking children, among typically developed (TD) children, and between children with and without…

Although various reasons have been proposed to explain the potential effectiveness of science stories to promote learning, no explicit relationship of stories to learning theory in science has been propounded. In this paper, two structurally analogous models are developed and compared: a structural model of stories and a temporal conceptual change…

Purpose: This study investigated the expressive elaboration of narratives from children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Forty-eight 6- and 8-year-old children with SLI were compared with forty-eight 6- and 8-year-old typical language (TL) children. Two imaginative narratives were scored for 14 elements of expressive elaboration in…

Purpose: The main purpose of this study was to examine how children with isolated speech sound disorders (SSDs; n = 20), children with combined SSDs and language impairment (LI; n = 20), and typically developing children (n = 20), ages 3;3 (years;months) to 6;6, differ in narrative ability. The second purpose was to determine if early narrative…

This study sought to test the most efficient representation mode with which children with hearing impairment could express a story while producing connectives indicating relations of time and of cause and effect. Using Bruner's (1973, 1986, 1990) representation stages, we tested the comparative effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) as a mode of…

Twenty language-disordered and 20 nonimpaired children, aged 9-11, performed story generation and story retelling tasks. For both groups, retold narratives were longer and contained more story grammar components and complete episode structures. Clause length differentiated story generation from story retelling for the language-disordered children…

Ten fourth grade language-learning-disabled children and 10 normal peers were shown a movie and subsequently asked to tell the story. Language-disabled subjects told less complex stories. It is concluded that normal subjects used a greater number of story grammar components within each narrative and remembered more aspects of the previously…

A study investigated both quantitative and qualitative differences between learning disabled (LD) and nonlearning disabled (NLD) subjects across three grade levels on two tasks requiring active processing of story grammar. Twelve LD and 12 NLD subjects were randomly selected from grades 4-5, 7-8, and 10-11 in a southwestern Florida school…

Twenty-three normal adults and four closed head-injured (CHI) adults with a high level of language recovery retold and generated stories. The two tasks differentially influenced the performance of both groups. The two groups differed in measures of cohesiveness and story grammar only in the story generation task. (Author/JDD)

Sixteen subjects with autism and 16 with Down Syndrome (aged 5 to 27), matched on verbal mental age, watched a short puppet show or video skit and were then asked to tell the story to a listener and answer follow-up questions. The majority of both groups were able to produce recognizable, though primitive, narratives. The groups did not differ in…

Factors that may influence the picture-elicited narrative production of 4-year-old children were examined. Subjects were 70 children of 4 years of age who told narratives about two familiar events: baking cookies and going to the beach. Of the sample, 22 children in a description condition described each of 6 line drawings for each event. Another…

A study examined the process of change in story development (in contrast to documenting common structures) found in the stories generated by cross-cultural/cross-linguistic students. Subjects, 12 first-grade native English-speaking students in either of two separate school districts and 23 cross-cultural/cross-linguistic students representing the…