Narrative abilities of Mandarin-speaking children with and without specific language impairment: Macrostructure and microstructure

Abstract

This study analyzed narratives from 18 Mandarin-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 18 typically developing children matched on chronological age. The narrative data were based on Frog, where are you? Participant’s narratives were analyzed at the macrostructure and microstructure levels. Regarding the macrostructure, the results revealed that the narratives of children with SLI included significantly less story grammar components, less evaluative comments, and were less coherent than those of TD controls. With respect to the microstructure, the two groups of children exhibited no significant differences in measures such as story length, syntactic complexity, and use of conjunctions; on the other hand, the SLI group employed significantly less variety of words. The outcomes underscore the merit of conducting a wide array of macrostructural measures in narratives, and evince the potential of the causal network model to assess the macrostructure of narratives in SLI. Overall, this study demonstrated the utility of macrostructure and lexical diversity in differentiating Mandarin-speaking children with and without SLI.