Browsing by Author "Uotinen, Nina"

Aims. Narrative skills are an essential part of interaction since early childhood. Narratives consist of different kinds of linguistic structures which are used to create the semantic content of a narrative. With the help of linguistic structures, it is also possible to convey information which cannot be expressed by describing only plotline/storyline. It is noted that linguistic structures and errors in them are the most effective part of narratives in distinguishing children with language impairment from children with typical development. This study examined linguistic structure, connectives and both number and quality of linguistic errors in the narratives of typically developing Finnish children and children with language impairment before school age. Methods. 10 five-year-old children participated in this study. Five of them were typically developing children and five had language impairment. The linguistic structure of the narratives was assessed with a set of toys, a picture book about a boy, a dog and a frog, and a Bus Story sequence of pictures. In the set of toys children had only toys with the same theme to elicit their narratives. In the picture book condition children had 24 temporally and logically ordered pictures and in the Bus Story; both picture sequence and an auditive model of the story to support narration. Narratives were analyzed with qualitative methods taking advantage of numbers, means and standard deviations. Results and conclusions. The results indicated that children with language impairment used simpler linguistic structure and they had more errors in their narratives than typically developing children. There were both fewer elliptical constructions and subordinate clauses in the narratives of children with language impairment than narratives of typically developing children. Children with language impairment also used simpler and more inaccurate connectives in their narratives. Children with language impairment made more of all kinds of errors but particularly errors which affected the sentence structure, distinguished research groups from each other. Elicitation method influenced most to the narratives of children with language impairment although there was variation in the narratives of typically developing children too, especially in complex language structures, but in much smaller effect. Children with language impairment used the weakest linguistic structure in narratives based on the set of toys. When there was more support to create narratives, children with language impairment were able to use more complex language. However, children with language impairment also made more errors in the most supported Bus Story narratives. Differing from children with language impairment, typically developing children used the most complex language in narratives based on the toys and the simplest language in the Bus Story. Elicitation method had only subtle effect on errors made by typically developing children.