Profiling oral narrative ability in young school-aged children

This study aimed to determine if oral narrative comprehension and production measures derived in a fictional story retelling task could be used to create a profile of strengths and weaknesses in oral narrative ability (Profile of Oral Narrative Ability: PONA) in young school-aged children. The story retelling task was field-tested with 169 typically developing children, aged between 5; 0 and 7; 6 years. Children listened twice to an unfamiliar story while looking at the pictures in a book. Comprehension questions were asked after the first exposure. Following the second exposure, children were asked to retell the story without the use of the pictures. Story retellings were analysed on measures of semantics, morphosyntax, verbal productivity, and narrative quality. Results indicated sensitivity for age on measures of comprehension, narrative quality, semantics, and verbal productivity, but not for morphosyntactic measures. Factor analysis indicated that oral narrative performance comprised three factors, explaining more than 80% of the variance. Two clinical case examples are presented, which show the potential of the PONA to reveal different patterns of strengths and weaknesses across the oral narrative measures. Although early evidence suggests the potential usefulness of the PONA, further research is now needed to test the validity, reliability and clinical application of this tool.