The Development And Application Of Narrative Assessment Test For 3-5 Years Old Children

An oral narrative can be defined as a monologue describing anexperience or events that are chronologically sequenced.This is ademanding task,and it relies on genrespecific content(for example the conventional forms used as introductions and closings),structural knowledge(plot development based on events linked through causal relationships),and linguistic knowledge.Analysis of children's productions of oral narratives provides a rich description of children's oral language skills.In line with previous reports,this study development a Narrative Assessment Tool for Children with 3-5 years old in Mandarin and applied it in children with language impairment to explore the characteristics of the development of narrative ability.The main contents and results are as follows:1.Establishment of a narration evaluation system for children aged 3-5 years.According to the principles of Delphi method,we consulted the 15 experts who were authoritative in special education or clinical and interested in the narrative study for several times.Then we concluded the feedbake opinions and calculated relevant indications.Finally,we use time,place,character,initial events,attempts,resolution,syntax,organizational structure,cohension,intelligibility and influency as indexes to evaluate the children's narrative ability.2.Estimate centiles standards for children with 3-5 years old in Mandarin.A total of 205 normally developing children(102 males and 103 females)aged 3;0 to 5;11 years were enrolled.Test-retest,intra-and inter-rater reliability were analysed on a sample of respectively 43,40 and 40 children.Normative data were gathered from all the enrolled children.The degree of difficulty is 0.1913 to 0.7895,the degree of discrimination is 0.4169 to 0.93090,test-retest,intra-and inter-rater reliability were 0.8170,0.9829,and 0.9914.The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test was used as a benchmark,with a validity of 0.7514.3.An analysis of the narrative abilities of children with language impairment.The study investigated the narrative ability of 40 preschool children with hearingimpaired and 31 preschool children with cerebral palsy.The results shows there were significant differences between the clinical groups and control groups.For preschool children with hearing-impaired,the majority of them were able to produce recognizable,though primitive,narratives.The differences are mainly reflected in the key information of the story,the story organization structure,syntax and grammatical errors,intelligibility and fluency.For preschool children with cerebral palsy,only a few of children can generate a story.The cerebral palsy children's narrative level lags far behind the typically developing children,which is equivalent to the level of the children aged 2-3 years old.They appeared to have difficulty grasping the story as a representation of meaningful events.Furthermore,they easily missed the main story elements,some of them also have articulatory speech disorders.The main innovations of this study:1.Evaluate the clinical utility of the time,place,character,initial events,attempts,resolution,syntax,organizational structure,cohension,intelligibility and influency as indexes of narrative ability for children with 3-5 years old.2.The Narrative Assessment Tool is a robust measure of children's overall oral narrative competence and a powerful tool for clinicians and researchers.3.Compare the differences between children with language impairment and typically developing children,analyzes the characteristics of children with language impairment's narrative abilities.Design a rehabilitation training framework to provide reference for early intervention and rehabilitation training for children with language impairment.