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.

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.