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This study investigated the possibility that the amount of content children include in their stories is affected by how stories are presented. Simple stories were presented to kindergarten and Grade 2 children in 3 conditions: orally (oral only), pictorially (pictures only), and combined oral and pictures. The kindergarteners recalled more content in the combined condition than in pictures only. The 2nd graders recalled more content in the oral only and combined conditions than in pictures only. The grades differed in both conditions involving oral presentation, but not in the pictures only condition. Thus, children in both grades provided more story information when they retold a story presented orally than when they told the story from pictures alone.
Key Words: children, language assessment, discourse analysis, story grammar, narratives
Storytelling tasks have frequently been recommended for use in assessment and intervention of children with language impairments (Hughes, McGillivray, & Schmidek, 1997; Strong, 1998). Storytelling is a context that requires a child to use the components of language for a communicative goal, thus challenging the child's language system and revealing linguistic vulnerabilities (Hadley, 1998). Analyses of content included in children's stories have been found to predict the language status of young children with early language impairments (Bishop & Edmundson, 1987) and the school achievement of children at risk for academic difficulties (Fazio, Naremore, & Connell, 1996). In addition, across a variety of elicitation methods and narrative measures, studies have found that children with language and/or learning difficulties scored lower on narrative measures than did their typically developing peers (Klecan-Aker, 1985; Liles, 1985a, 1985b, 1987; MacLachlan & Chapman, 1988; Manhardt & Rescorla, 2002; Merritt & Liles, 1987; Paul & Smith, 1993; Ripich & Griffith, 1988; Roth & Spekman, 1986; Schneider, Hayward, & Dubé, 2001). The research on children's Storytelling abilities has documented that narrative skills develop over time and that children with language or learning difficulties generally score lower than typically developing children on a variety of narrative measures. However, research studies have not yet established what to expect from children at a particular age on a particular narrative measure.
One reason that narrative age expectations are unclear is that there are many different ways that story data have been collected. A variety of story presentation techniques have...