This thesis is comprised of three manuscripts, each concerned with the narrative abilities of school-aged French-speaking children as assessed with the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI). The three studies involved the same three groups of participants: one group of 12 children with SLI between the ages of eight year three months and nine year nine months, 12 typically-developing children of the same age and 12 typically-developing children matched on language abilities. Each child completed narrative tasks, language abilities tasks and cognitive tasks during one experimental session at their home. / The first manuscript compares the ENNI narrative production (story grammar and referential expression) of school-aged French-speaking children to those of English-speaking children of the same age. It also provides data on the use of the ENNI with the school-aged French-speaking population with specific language impairment (SLI) by comparing their performance to the performance of their typically-developing (TD) peers. The second manuscript aims to identify which linguistic and cognitive skills contribute to narrative production of children with and without SLI at two levels: the micro- and the macro- levels. Finally, the third manuscript investigates the impact of variations in syntactic demand on the narratives produced by French-speaking children with SLI in comparison to the narratives produced by their age- and language- matched peers. The discussion summarizes the characteristics of French-speaking children's narrative production, the factors contributing to competency in narrative production, and explores the implications of these findings for language processing of children with and without SLI.

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