The Ability of Five Children With Developmental Language Disorder to Describe Mental States in Stories

Abstract

This study described the ability of five children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to relate the mental states of story characters in two conditions: spontaneous story generation and in response to direct questions. Children spontaneously generated stories from wordless picture books. Subsequently, they were prompted, “What was (character) thinking” and “How does (character) feel?” for each story illustration. For each condition, the number of internal responses, internal plans, and emotion words that children produced were identified and analyzed for accuracy according to the pictured story content. Descriptions of story characters’ internal states, especially emotions, increased in response to prompts, but the accuracy of those descriptions decreased. In response to the prompts, children frequently conveyed emotion words that did not reflect the pictured story content accurately. The ability to relate internal states in story generation was constrained not only by linguistic deficits but also by limited social and emotional knowledge.