No description available.

Det saknas logopediskt bedömningsmaterial normerat för flerspråkiga barn, och kunskapen om dessa barns typiska tal- och språkutveckling är begränsad hos logopeder i Sverige. Detta leder till över- och underdiagnostisering av språkstörning. Denna studie syftar till att undersöka svensk-engelsktalande barns narrativer (berättelser). Dessa analyseras kvantitativt och kvalitativt, både makrostrukturellt (story grammar) och mikrostrukturellt (lingvistiska mått). Även narrativ förståelse undersöks och jämförs med produktion. Studiens deltagare är 16 simultant flerspråkiga svensk-engelsktalande barn i åldern 6-7 år, som går i förskoleklass eller i första klass. Narrativerna eliciteras med hjälp av två bildsekvenser ur ett bedömningsmaterial framtaget av en forskningsgrupp inom COST Action IS0804. Bedömningsmaterialet innehåller även förståelsefrågor till bildsekvenserna, och bakgrundsfrågor för vårdnadshavare att fylla i. Resultaten visar inga skillnader i makrostruktur mellan svenska och engelska, vilket tyder på att narrativ förmåga inte nödvändigtvis är språkbunden. Jämförelser mellan förståelse och produktion av utvalda story grammar-komponenter visar dock en tydlig skillnad. Förståelsen för en karaktärs mål (story grammar-komponenten goal), vad karaktären vill uppnå, är etablerad hos de flesta deltagarna trots att produktionen av goal är begränsad. Till skillnad från makrostrukturen, skiljer sig mikrostrukturen åt i narrativerna. De engelska narrativerna är både längre och mer komplexa än de svenska. Skillnaderna mellan barn i förskoleklass och i första klass är dessutom stor, både makro- och mikrostrukturellt. Detta tyder på att mycket händer i barns språkliga och narrativa utveckling i tidig skolålder. Tvärspråkligt inflytande förefaller vara en naturlig del av den typiska språkutvecklingen hos simultant flerspråkiga barn. / There are no standardised tests for assessing bilingual children’s speech and language development, and the knowledge about these children’s typical language development is limited amongst speech and language therapists in Sweden. Studies have shown that this can lead to misdiagnosis of language impairment in these children. The aim of this study is to investigate the narratives of Swedish-English speaking children. Analysis is made, both quantitatively and qualitatively, regarding the macrostructure (story grammar) and the microstructure (linguistic measurements) of the narratives. Narrative comprehension is also examined, and compared with the produced narratives. The participants are 16 simultaneously bilingual Swedish-English speaking children, aged 6-7 years and either attending preschool class or first grade in the Swedish education system. The narratives are elicited using two different sets of pictures from an assessment material designed by a research group within COST Action IS0804. The assessment material also contains comprehension questions and a form for carers to fill in, regarding the children’s linguistic backgrounds. The results in this study show no macrostructural differences between the Swedish and the English narratives, which indicates that narrative ability is not necessarily language dependent. There is a clear difference between the comprehension and production of selected story grammar components. Despite the limited production of characters’ goals in the narratives, the participants appear to have established the comprehension of this story grammar component. The microstructural analysis of the narratives shows that the English narratives are both longer and more complex than the Swedish ones. There are differences between participants attending Swedish preschool class and participants attending Swedish first grade, with regards to both macrostructure and microstructure. The differences indicate that language and narrative ability is increasing between the ages of 6 and 7. Crosslinguistic influence appears to be a natural part of typical language development in simultaneously bilingual children.

Numerous studies have shown that children identified with Language Impairment (LI) have marked difficulty with producing story narratives compared to their typically developing peers. One particular area of weakness seen in the narratives of children with LI is their ability to incorporate internal states, specifically internal response, internal plan, and emotion words. The current study examines five children with LI and their descriptions of mental and emotional states of characters in story narratives under spontaneous and prompted conditions. Participants produced story retells based on a series of wordless picture books taken from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument. Story retells were elicited twice for each story, once with and once without verbal prompts. As expected, children produced more internal state story elements in response to prompts. As children produced more of these elements, however, their accuracy decreased, and the states they reported did not always reflect the story content. The children with LI showed limited understanding and ability to interpret the reactions, motivations, and emotions that characters experienced. However, verbal prompts did reveal children's current abilities and understanding of internal states.

Narrative production and comprehension is a difficult task for children with language impairment (LI). Their stories are typically shorter and contain more grammatical errors than the stories of typically developing age-matched peers. This pilot study describes the abilities of six children with LI to produce stories from pictured stimuli. Stories were elicited from each child during a 10-week period. Stimulus pictures and coding procedures from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument were employed to analyze the participants' story grammar (SG). Eight SG elements were assessed including character introduction, setting, initiating event (IE), internal response (IR), internal plan (IP), attempt, and outcome. The children varied highly in their production of SG elements. The SG elements that described the internal states, emotions, and motivations of the characters were the most difficult for all participants.

Many children identified with Language Impairment (LI) demonstrate difficulty comprehending and producing narratives. Their narratives are often structurally less complex and of overall poorer quality than those produced by their typically developing peers. These difficulties may negatively impact the academic and social success of children with LI. This thesis evaluates the performance of five school-aged children with LI on a story retell probe embedded within an intervention designed to address their social and emotional language abilities. During the 10-week intervention, participants completed a series of story retell probes using wordless picture books. The story stimuli were taken from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument, which included six stories (divided into two story sets), elicited twice (12 total story retells). The production of story grammar (SG) categories was analyzed for each story retell. The results for each participant and SG category varied greatly, but all participants had difficulty producing the more complex SG elements. Although each participant demonstrated some improvement from the first retell to the second on at least one story, overall performance remained fairly stable over the 10-week period. Future research is needed to determine effective ways to support more complex story narratives in children with LI.

This study examined how 22 children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus (SBH) and 22 matched control children with the same vocabulary age (VA) performed on story retelling and story generation tasks. The children were asked to retell two stories of different lengths (Stein and Glenn's Melvin, the Skinny Mouse and The Tiger's Whisker) and generate two stories from different stimuli (wordless picture book and verbal story starter). Analyses were conducted in terms of global narrative organization (story structure), local connection of ideas (cohesion), and productivity (number of words and utterances). Two-way ANOVAs were conducted to analyze how the stories and story tasks (retell versus generation) influenced the two groups' narrative performance. When comparisons were made between the two groups' performances on the individual stories, the children with SBH generally produced shorter and less complex stories than their VA peers. Story-by-group interaction effects showed that the children with SBH produced fewer story grammar elements than their VA peers on the retell stories but not on the generated ones. When comparisons were made between the two groups' performances on the type of task (story retell versus generation), results showed that for story retelling, the children with SBH produced stories that contained fewer words and utterances than their VA peers, significantly fewer story grammar components, and more correct cohesive ties. For the story generation task, the children with SBH produced significantly fewer reactions and total story grammar components. Story-by-group interaction effects showed that the children with SBH produced fewer reactions and total different words than the VA group on the story retell task but not the generation task. The results suggest that children with SBH function differently from their vocabulary age peers in some dimensions of narrative production. When the children with SBH encountered the retelling tasks or the more structured generation story, they tended to produce stories that were shorter than those of their VA peers.

Idag växer var femte barn i Sverige upp med fler än ett språk i sin vardag. Flerspråkiga barn följer samma steg i sin språkutveckling som barn som växer upp med endast ett språk. Deras språkutveckling har dock några särskilda egenskaper, som kan te sig som avvikelser när man bedömer barnets språk med de aktuella tester i grammatik, ordförråd, fonologi, som oftast är normerade för enspråkiga barn. Det är mycket svårt att urskilja en typisk flerspråkig utveckling från en språkstörning med dagens kunskap och material. Denna studie har för syfte att undersöka barnets narrativa förmåga, med fokus på makrostrukturen i berättelsen, och undersöka om det föreligger en skillnad mellan enspråkiga och flerspråkiga barn, samt hur de flerspråkiga barnen presterar på sitt starkaste respektive svagaste språk. För detta ändamål har vi samlat in och jämfört berättelser hos 21 enspråkiga och 21 tvåspråkiga barn födda 2005 och 2006 (medelålder 6 år och 9 månader), med franska och/eller svenska som modersmål, både i Sverige och i Frankrike. Barnen har fått i uppgift att berätta två olika sagor, utifrån två bildserier med tydlig och identisk makrostruktur. Både bildsekvenserna och bedömningsmaterialet har utvecklats inom projektet Bi-SLI (Cost Action IS0804). Berättelserna har sedan analyserats och poängsatts utifrån makrostrukturen. Huvudresultatet visar att det inte finns någon signifikant skillnad mellan enspråkiga och flerspråkiga barns prestationer i vår studie (medelvärde 9,24p för de enspråkiga och 9,40p för de flerspråkiga, av 17p möjliga). Vårt resultat visar också att de flerspråkiga barnen presterar lika bra på båda sina språk, oavsett om ena språket är starkare än det andra (identiska medelvärden på 9,40p för både det svagaste och det starkaste språket). Dessa resultat tyder på att berättelsens makrostruktur kan vara en pålitlig markör för avvikande språkutveckling, oavsett om barnet har ett eller flera språk. Det innebär också att det kan räcka med att testa barnet enbart på ett av sina språk för att få en pålitlig uppfattning av hens narrativa förmåga. / In Sweden today one in five children grow up with more than one language in their environment. Multilingual children follow the same stages of language development as children who grow up speaking just one language. This language development of multilingual children however, has a set of distinctive characteristics that could be misinterpreted as anomalies when the available grammar, vocabulary and phonology tests created for monolingual children are used. It is very difficult to distinguish a typical multilingual development from a speech impairment, given today’s knowledge and material. The present study aims to look at children’s narrative abilities using a story’s macrostructure, and examine the possible differences between monolingual and multilingual children, as well as how the multilingual children perform in both their stronger and their weaker languages. To this end we have collated and compared narratives from 21 monolingual and 21 multilingual children born 2005 and 2006 (average age 6yrs 9months), with French and/or Swedish as their mother tongue, both in Sweden and France. The children were given the task of telling two different stories from two separate picture cards with clear and identical macrostructures. Both picture stories and assessment forms were developed within the Bi-SLI project (Cost Action IS0804). The stories were then analysed and scored based on their macrostructure.The main results showed that no significant difference was found between monolingual and multilingual children’s performance in our study (an average of 9,24p for the monolingual and9.40p for the multilingual children, out of 17 possible points). Our results also showed that the multilingual children performed equally well in either of their languages, even if one language was stronger than the other (identical average marks of 9,40 for both the weaker and the stronger language). These results indicate that a narrative’s macrostructure can be a reliable indicator for an anomalous language development, regardless whether the child has one or several languages. The results also show that it may be enough to test a child solely on one of his or her languages to obtain a reliable indication of their narrative abilities.