Clinical Assessment of Narratives in Speech Language Pathology

Early detection of narrative difficulties is important for the identification of children at risk for future social and academic deficits. Narrative assessments can provide a wealth of information regarding children’s speech and language development including but not limited to working memory, word retrieval abilities, syntactic structure, vocabulary knowledge, and use, sequencing abilities, perspective-taking skills, conversational cohesion, and fluidity as well as speech clarity.

This 72 slide presentation will provide rationale in support of narrative assessments; describe the clinical assessment of narrative abilities in children of various ages, provide participants with specific recommendations for evaluating children’s narratives as well as demonstrate to participants how to score various narrative transcripts.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Explain the impact of narrative difficulties on language development and academic performance
2. Discuss stages of narrative development from preschool through adolescence
3. Describe how to elicit narratives in children of various ages
4. Identify specific elements of clinical narrative assessment with respect to analysis

Slide Content:

• What does it mean to tell a story?
• Why Assess Narrative Abilities?
• Narrative Abilities and Social Communication Competence
• Narrative Abilities and Reading Development
• The Value of Narratives
• Narratives sensitive to narrative competence
• Clinical Narrative Assessment
• Advantages of Clinical Narrative Assessments
• Fictional Narratives: Elicitation Methods
• Narrative Assessment: Sample Materials
• What do Narratives Reveal?
• Assessment Procedures
• Major Narrative Elements
• Microstructure vs. Macrostructure
• Analyzing Microstructure
  • Word Finding
  • Analyzing Form
• Analyzing Macrostructure
  • Story Grammar  Elements
  • Perspective Taking
• Narrative Stages
• Episodic Structure
• Narratives of Language Impaired Children
  • 6-year-old
  • 9-year-old 
• Adolescent Language Sampling Genres
• Benefits of Language Sampling
• What Makes a Narrative Linguistically Sophisticated?
• Adolescent Use of Abstract Vocabulary
  • Adolescent Use of Abstract Nouns
  • Adolescent Use of Metacognitive Verbs
  • Word Definition Development in Adolescents 13-18 years of age (Nippold, 2016)
• Assessment of Abstract Vocabulary
• Adolescent Syntax
• Adolescent Discourse and Pragmatics
  • Peer Conflict Resolution (PCR) Tasks
• Syntax: What is a T-Unit?
• Microstructural Components
• Case Studies
• Conclusion
• FREE Narrative Assessment Resources