The Effect of Age and Task Complexity on the Microstructure of Child Arabic Narratives.

Abstract

This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. This study employed a cross-sectional research design and enrolled 96 monolingual speakers of Kuwaiti Arabic. Four groups of children aged 4;0-7;11 (years;months) were randomly recruited from public schools across Kuwait. The groups consisted of 22 four-year-olds (Kindergarten 1), 24 five-year-olds (Kindergarten 2), 25 six-year-olds (Grade 1), and 25 seven-year-olds (Grade 2). Two sets of sequential pictures from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument were used to elicit storytelling from all participants: a one-episode story and a more complex three-episode story. The children's stories were analyzed to determine if there were differences in narrative microstructure as a function of age and task complexity. The data indicated that productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic structures increased with task complexity. The length of communication units, the average mean length of the three longest utterances, and the amount and variety of words in the children's productions were all significantly larger in the more complex story. Only one syntactic structure showed age as well as task effects. Clinical recommendations include adapting the coding scheme to fit Arabic data, using the more complex narrative alone for microstructure analysis, and calculating only a few measures for productivity and syntactic complexity to save time.