Objective: The first objective of this study was to examine how three groups of children age 3.25 to 6.5 years differ in narrative ability during the years of emergent literacy. These groups included children with co-morbid speech sound disorders (SSD) and language impairment (LI), children with isolated SSD, and typically developing children. The second objective was to determine if early narrative ability predicts reading and written language ability at school age (8 to 12 years).
Method: The children were given a narrative retelling task before formal literacy instruction. The early narratives were analyzed and compared for group differences. Reading decoding, reading comprehension, and written language ability were later tested at school age, and regression was used to compare the results with the children’s early performance on the narrative task.
Results: The children with isolated SSD did not differ from the control group. Significant group differences were found between the group of children with co-morbid SSD and LI and the other two groups. Specifically, these differences included the ability to answer questions about the story, use of story grammars, and number of correct and irrelevant utterances. Syntactic and semantic measures such as mean length of C-unit, number of C-units, number of words, and number of different words were not significantly different. The early narratives were predictive of literacy skills at school age. Measures of story structure and accuracy proved to be the best predictors of reading comprehension, written language, and the decoding of real words. Measures of syntax and lexical diversity were the best predictors of decoding nonsense words.
Conclusions: These results suggest that LI, and not SSD, interferes with a child’s ability to retell a narrative and answer comprehension questions. The results also suggest that narrative retelling is a useful task for identifying children who may be at risk for later academic problems in the areas of reading and written language.