Intervention in the Cohesion of Narrative Discourse in Pupils with Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to verify the effectiveness of an intervention program on cohesion in pupils with typical development and with developmental language disorder. A total of 99 5-year-old pupils from schools in the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) participated. For the narrative analysis, a story retelling task was used, studying cohesive resources such as ellipsis, anaphora, possessives, and connectors. The intervention program was organized at different levels of practice and involved teachers and speech language therapists. The results indicated that the pupils diagnosed with developmental language disorder initially presented worse performance in cohesion than their peers with typical development. Finally, the two groups of children who received the intervention program showed significantly higher gains than the two groups without treatment, with medium or small effect sizes.