When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

This study investigates the effects of early second-language (L2) acquisition on introduction of characters in narrative discourse by comparing 5- and 7-year-old monolingual (first-language [L1] = Turkish) and bilingual (L1 = Turkish, L2 = English) children. Turkish does not have a grammaticalized article system like English which enables to…

Purpose: We examined indices of narrative microstructure as metrics of language development and impairment in Arabic-speaking children. We examined their age sensitivity, correlations with standardized measures, and ability to differentiate children with average language and language impairment. Method: We collected story narratives from 177…

This early-stage feasibility study investigated the effects of a multitiered oral narrative language intervention on oral language, reading comprehension, and writing. Twenty-eight second-grade students participated in this quasi-experimental control group study with assignment at the classroom level. The independent variable was large- and…

This study investigates the referential choice of Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The data consist of narratives from 16 children with ASD and 16 typically-developing (TD) children. The narratives were elicited using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" Participants' referential expressions…