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Development of narratives in Tamil-speaking preschool children: A task comparison study.

ABSTRACT: 'Narrative' can be simply defined as a spoken or written account of connected events or experiences. The present study records the development of microstructure elements of narratives in 200 typically developing Tamil-speaking children aged between three years and six years and eleven months. It then compares their narrative productivity across two elicitation contexts: story retelling (SR) and story generation (SG). The samples thus obtained are analyzed for three narrative microstructure parameters, namely total number of words (TNW) in the narrative, mean length of utterances (MLU) and the number of utterances. The results reveal an increasing trend in all three microstructure parameters across both contexts. All three parameters are found to be quantitatively high in SR than in SG. Variation in the performance in these narrative tasks has been explained with behavioural observations from literature, cognitive architecture and a working memory model. It was found that gender differences do not follow a uniform pattern across age groups and elicitation contexts. Since the study has generated normative data for microstructure parameters of narratives, the observations can be used to analyze language deviance and help plan the narrative intervention protocol for language therapy.

SUBMITTER: Venkatraman K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8326734 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:This study explores the emergence and productivity of word order usage in Mandarin-speaking typically-developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and examines how this emergence relates to frequency of use in caregiver input. Forty-two caregiver-child dyads participated in video-recorded 30-min semi-structured play sessions. Eleven children with ASD were matched with 10 20-month-old TD children and another 11 children with ASD were matched with 10 26-month-old TD children, on expressive language. We report four major findings: (1) Preschool Mandarin-speaking children with ASD produced word order structures with pervasive ellipsis at similar rates to language-matched TD children, but also displayed differences from TD children in their usage of SVt and VtO frames; (2) Grammatical productivity was observed in both TD children and children with ASD; moreover, children with ASD with higher expressive language produced less stereotyped language; (3) Both TD children and children with ASD heard a range of word orders in their caregivers' input, with TD children's input greater in amount and complexity; however, caregivers of both groups also showed no age/language-related changes in word order usage; (4) Few word-order-specific correlations emerged between caregivers and their children; however, strong correlations were observed for mean length of utterances (MLU) for both groups: Caregivers who produced longer/more complex utterances had children who did the same. Taken together, it seems that despite their pragmatic deficits, the early grammatical knowledge of word order in Mandarin-exposed children with ASD is well preserved and in general follows the typical developmental pattern. Moreover, caregiver input is broadly rather than finely tuned to the linguistic development of TD children and children with ASD, and plays a more important role in children's general syntactic development than in specific word order acquisition. Thus, early word order usage in preschool Mandarin-speaking TD children and children with ASD may be influenced by both caregiver input and child abilities.

Project description:Purpose This study examines the influence of lexical and phonological factors on expressive lexicon size in 40 French-speaking children tested longitudinally from 22 to 48 months. The factors include those based on the lexical and phonological properties of words in the children's lexicons (phonetic complexity, word length, neighborhood density [ND], and word frequency [WF]) as well as variables measuring phonological production (percent consonants correct and phonetic inventory size). Specifically, we investigate the relative influence of these factors at individual ages, namely, 22, 29, 36, and 48 months, and which factors measured at 22 and 29 months influence lexicon size at 36 and 48 months. Method Children were selected based on parent-reported vocabulary size. We included children with low, medium, and high vocabulary scores. The children's lexicons were coded in terms of phonetic complexity, word length, ND, and WF, and their phonological production skills were based on measures of percent consonants correct and phonetic inventory size extracted from spontaneous speech samples at 29, 36, and 48 months. In the case of ND and WF, we focused on one- and two-syllable nouns. Results Across the age range, the most important factor that explained variance in lexicon size was the WF of nouns. Children who selected low-frequency nouns had larger vocabularies across all ages (22-48 months). The WF of two-syllable nouns and phonological production measured at 29 months influenced lexicon size at 36 months, whereas the WF (of one- and two-syllable words) influenced lexicon size at 48 months. Conclusions The findings support the role of WF and phonological production in explaining expressive vocabulary development. Children enlarge their vocabularies by adding nouns of increasingly lower frequency. Phonological production plays a role in accounting for vocabulary size up until the age of 36 months. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12291074.

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Development of narratives in Tamil-speaking preschool children: A task comparison study.

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