The effect of a shared visual context during the presentation of elicitation stimuli on the narratives of young children with and without language impairment

Heleen Van der Merwe,Monique Visser,Lara Booysen,Delanie Smit,Yolande Fourie,Daleen Klop

doi:10.5774/42-0-144

Abstract

This study aims to ascertain whether a shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment influences the narratives produced by the children. Participants were 20 typically developing (TD) children and 10 children with language impairment (LI), aged 6 to 8 years. They were randomly assigned to two groups and assessed with two different presentation methods. Narrative performance was measured in terms of micro- and macrostructure. Microstructural variables included productivity (total number of words, total number of T-units), syntactic complexity (mean length of T-unit) and lexical diversity measures (total number of different words, number of internal state terms). Macrostructural variables included cohesion measures (number of complete, incomplete and error ties) and story structure scores measured by the Afrikaans translation (Klop, Visser and Oosthuizen 2012a) of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings-Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives© (LITMUS-MAIN) (Gagarina et al. 2012). Both presentation methods elicited narratives of similar quality in terms of the micro- and macrostructural variables in all the groups. A shared visual context between examiners and children during narrative assessment therefore did not influence the narratives produced by children with LI and TD children.

Highlights

The goal of assessment in speech-language therapy is to obtain data on a person’s communication performance so that a diagnosis and appropriate goals for clinical management can be formulated (Owens 2004:58)
There were no significant differences between the two elicitation procedures with regard to the quantity, lexical diversity and syntactic complexity measures
Our results indicated that the elicitation procedures had little impact on the micro- and macrostructural http://spil.journals.ac.za variables that were investigated in the narratives of typically developing (TD) and language impairment (LI) children

Summary

Introduction

The goal of assessment in speech-language therapy is to obtain data on a person’s communication performance so that a diagnosis and appropriate goals for clinical management can be formulated (Owens 2004:58). It is important to select assessment procedures that provide valid representations of a child’s speech and language abilities (Boudreau 2008:105) and are challenging enough to reveal linguistic vulnerability (Hadley 1998:138). Narrative performance represents a set of dynamic skills that are influenced by contextual factors such as elicitation frameworks and task demands (Boudreau 2008:105). Research has shown that both the comprehension and production of narratives can be influenced by the elicitation context (e.g., structured or unstructured), story genre (e.g., story retellings, story generations or personal stories), narrative themes, the child’s experiences and world knowledge, the presentation modality (e.g., audio, visual or combined audio-visual input), and the familiarity of the listener (Gazella and Stockman 2003:65; Liles 1993:873)

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