Abstract
Background: A narrative requires the integration and management of linguistic and cognitive skills. It has been observed that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties in narrating stories. This research proposes an intervention in a case of a child 9 years and 2 months old with DLD, with the aim of improving his oral narrative skills through a retelling task via telepractice. Methods: In the evaluation, standardized tests have been used and a ‘remembering a story’ task, with a story titled The Lost Backpack, elaborated by one of the authors. Narratives were elicited in two sessions, and were transcribed, coded, and analysed using the Child Language Data Exchange System CHILDES Project tool. The participant received a total of 10 sessions through the Skype platform, which included intervention-addressed explicit instruction about the narrative structure and the use of discourse markers to improve cohesion in story retelling. Results: Significant changes were observed in the retelling of the story at microstructure and macrostructure levels: an increase of the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), Types and Tokens, specific vocabulary, discourse markers and the recall of events. Conclusions: These results demonstrate the effectiveness of intervention in narrative skills through the oral retelling of a story with visual support via tele-practice.
Highlights
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) [1] is understood to be a communication disorder that affects acquisition and development of language, which cannot be explained by the presence of other conditions, such as hearing loss, mental retardation, brain injury, psychological disorders, or poor socio-emotional adjustment [2]
The tasks of retelling the story and that of generating it constitute an adequate context for evaluation of narrative abilities because it is necessary to coherently organise information in order to retell the story. These tasks have been widely used in the evaluation of narrative abilities in individuals with DLD [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
It has been observed that the production of narratives by those with DLD are shorter, syntactically simpler, with greater frequency of syntactic, semantic, and morphological errors, as well as with less cohesion [11]
Summary
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (formerly known as Specific Language Impairment, SLI) [1] is understood to be a communication disorder that affects acquisition and development of language, which cannot be explained by the presence of other conditions, such as hearing loss, mental retardation, brain injury, psychological disorders, or poor socio-emotional adjustment [2]. The difficulties persist over time and problems may be observed on a linguistic level, and in other areas, which leads to lower motor coordination [4], less symbolic play [5], as well as short-term visual memory [6] and deficits in auditory working memory [7]. The prevalence of this disorder is around 7% of the population without significant differences between sexes, it is slightly more frequent among males [8]. Conclusions: These results demonstrate the effectiveness of intervention in narrative skills through the oral retelling of a story with visual support via tele-practice
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