Vertelvaardigheden bij kinderen met een specifieke taalontwikkelingsstoornis en zich normaal ontwikkelende kleuters

Narrative tasks are often used to examine the language development of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). These tasks are complex, due to both linguistically and cognitively demands. Earlier studies show that age matched typically developing children (TD) outperform children with SLI on both content (semantic-pragmatic skills) and form (morphosyntactic skills) of narratives and that children with SLI show a dissociation between form and content skills. However, there is less information about narrative skills of children with SLI in comparison to younger, language matched TD children. Therefore, this study compares narrative ability of children with SLI (age 6 & 7) to that of younger TD children (age 4 & 5) matched on passive vocabulary. Both a story generation and a story retelling task were conducted and analyzed for content and form (morphosyntactical complexity and correctness). The results show that children with SLI in the domain of narrative content only differ from younger TD children for variety of content words during story retelling. There are no differences found for morphological complexity, but significantly more morphosyntactic errors were made in the SLI group. Thereby, the children in the SLI group show most often a dissociation in which form is relatively less developed than content, where the TD children show a balanced development. Task effects were found in favor of story retelling for content variables. The results indicate that children with SLI show a delay for both content and form, but that realizing adequate morphosyntactic sentences seem to be most vulnerable during narration. With these results clinical linguists and speech therapists have more information about the narrative development in young children and in children with SLI which can guide their diagnostic and therapeutic work.