Oral narrative comprehension skills in Russian 7-years-age children with language impairment

Abstract

Introduction. At the stage of transition from a preschool to a school age, children already should have mastered sufficient skills for both narrative comprehension and production. During school activities, a vast number of narratives are usually employed, and, thus, a child who struggles with narrative comprehension/production falls into the at-risk group. Narrative comprehension/production ability requires complex cognitive and linguistic skills (Kornev, Balčiūnienė 2017) and, thus, even the mild intelligence/language impairment might lead to dramatic decrease in the learning outcomes. Unfortunately, in Russia, a considerable number of children with the mild primary language impairment (literally, ‘general underdevelopment of speech, the third level’) attend mass schools and do not receive a speech/language therapy; therefore, their difficulties in narrative comprehension presumably have a negative impact on their learning outcomes. However, narrative comprehension at the school age still lacks experimental and large-sample studies. Methodology. The purpose of our study was to assess the comprehension of the oral narrative by Russian primary school age children. The experimental group consisted of 7-years-age primarily language-impaired (PLI) children (N=20); the control group consisted of typically-developing (TD) peers (N=20). To assess the comprehension of oral narrative, the Russian version (Kornev, Levkovskaya 2016) of the Test for Listening Text Comprehension (Levorato, Roch 2007) was employed. The methodology allowed us to evaluate the children’s ability: a) to extract and to memorize the basic information from the narrative text, b) to draw conclusions based on the narrative, and c) to understand explicit, figurative, and implicit meanings of the sentences. Results. [...]