A Comparative Macrostructural Analysis of Narrative Discourse in Children with Typical Language Development and Children with Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

The aim of this study is to compare the narrative ability of
children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and
children with typical language development (TLD) using new
material for narrative assessment – the Multilingual Assessment
Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Twenty children with DLD
and twenty with TLD, mean age 6.6 years, all monolingual
speakers of Croatian, participated in the study. Results
demonstrated that children with TLD outperform children with
DLD at the macrostructure level in both conditions – story
generation and retelling. In addition, the type of elicitation was
shown to have an impact on narrative production.