The Narragram: A New Way to Describe Children's Recall of Stories

Abstract

Narrative production is often used to measure a child's communicative progress. Typical methods include assessment of quality or content. We propose a new way to describe narrative performance with a simple graph that depicts recall accuracy in relation to the sequence of story details. Children with impaired hearing (9–12 years-old) watched a 5-minute animated Pingu story on television, and then re-told the story. Each child's narrative was video-recorded and transcribed into text. We produced a list of ‘mini-events’ to describe each Pingu story. Each child's spoken narrative was compared with this list to identify which mini-events the child included. The result is a simple graph, a narragram, that depicts inclusion and omission of details. Omissions can be explained by the script, production method, and/or the child. A teacher or therapist can visually examine the child's results, obtain an impression of recall performance, and relate recall to details in the original story.