Narrative skills in five-year-old children: Desing of an instrument for clinical assessment of language

Abstract

The skills involved in narrative competence allow us to predict the child’s further cognitive-linguistic performance. Thus, from a speech and language perspective, it is extremely important to have clinical tools to evaluate such aspect .The present manuscript addresses the design of a clinical instrument   to assess the abilities involved in narrative competence. Such abilities comprise those related to the development of canonical narrative structure as well as those related to the expression of content. These abilities are analyzed   through an activity of re-telling a store induced from an ad-hoc oral text accompanied with pictures .A form specifically created for systematic qualitative and quantitative analysis was used to collect the data. The materials used in and a preliminary psychometric analysis of a pilot study conducted in 22 normal-language  development pre-school children coming from middle-class families in the city of Buenos Aires are discussed. The results show that the instrument is capable of determining which narrative skills are involved in pre-school children and the manner they should be assessed.