“Frog, where are you?” Narratives in children with specific language impairment, early focal brain injury, and Williams syndrome

Abstract

In this cross-population study, we use narratives as a context to investigate language development in children from 4 to 12 years of age from three experimental groups: children with early unilateral focal brain damage (FL; N=52); children with specific language impairment (SLI; N=44); children with Williams syndrome (WMS; N=36), and typically developing controls. We compare the developmental trajectories of these groups in the following domains: morphological errors, use of complex syntax, complexity of narrative structure, and types and frequency of evaluative devices. For the children with early unilateral brain damage, there is initial delay. However, by age 10, they are generally within the normal range of performance for all narrative measures. Interestingly, there are few, if any, side specific differences. Children with SLI, who have no frank neurological damage and show no cognitive impairment demonstrate significantly more delay on all morphosyntactic measures than the FL group. Quantitatively, on morphosyntactic measures, the SLI group clusters with those children with WMS who are moderately retarded. Together these data help us to understand the extent and nature of brain plasticity for language development and those aspects of language and discourse that are dissociable.

Introduction

The overall goal of this special issue is to use the behavior of special groups of children to enhance our understanding of the brain bases of language and language development, and to this end, in this paper we examine narratives from four groups of school-aged children: children with early brain injury, children with specific language impairment, children with Williams syndrome and typically developing comparison children. Each population provides a different perspective on language acquisition and narrative development as well as their components. By comparing the performance of these groups of children we can directly address three critical issues in developmental neuroscience:

• the nature and extent of neuroplasticity;

• how general intellectual impairment with a specific genetic basis may affect the process of language acquisition and narrative development;

• the nature of the language acquisition process itself.

Study I addresses the issue of neuroplasticity by comparing morphosyntactic development in the narratives of children with early brain damage (FL), children with specific language impairment (SLI), and typically developing comparison children (TD). To evaluate the role of a genetically based cognitive impairment, Study II juxtaposes the stories of children with Williams syndrome (WMS) with those of children with SLI as well as chronological age matched typically developing children in an attempt to distinguish those aspects of narratives that are cognitively based from those that are specifically linguistic. Finally, to the degree we can identify processes and milestones that are common to all our populations, we can begin to uncover core aspects of the language acquisition process itself.

Narratives are found across different contexts, cultures, and times. From stories at the dinner table (Ochs, Smith, & Taylor, 1989) to some of our very oldest records (e.g., the Old Testament stories in the Bible and Aesop’s fables), narratives continue to serve as a means to convey culturally significant information. In part due to their pervasiveness, narratives, as a discourse form, are accessible to even the youngest in society: children have some notion of “what a story is” by age 3 (Appleby, 1978). Given their frequency and ‘everyday’ nature, narratives provide an excellent quasi-naturalistic measure of children’s spontaneous language, and reflect distinctive structural and linguistic changes through childhood and adolescence. Although, researchers agree that children are generally proficient with the majority of the morphosyntactic structures of their language by age 5 (e.g., Brown, 1973; Slobin, 1985), understanding how and when to use these structures fluently and flexibly in particular discourse genres continues to develop well into adolescence. Thus, narratives provide a rich context for evaluating multiple aspects of linguistic development in school-aged children. Indeed, numerous researchers have exploited this goldmine in both typically developing children (e.g., Bamberg, 1987; Bamberg & Reilly, 1996; Berman & Slobin, 1994; Peterson & McCabe, 1983; Reilly, 1992), as well as in atypical populations (Anderson, 1998; Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1991; Capps, Kehres, & Sigman, 1998; Capps, Losh, & Thurber, 2000; Dennis, Jacennik, & Barnes, 1992; Liles, 1993; Losh, Bellugi, Reilly, & Anderson, 2001; Losh & Capps, in press; Loveland, McEvoy, & Tunali, 1990; Reilly, Bates, & Marchman, 1998; Reilly, Klima, & Bellugi, 1990; Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1995).

In their seminal paper on narratives, Labov and Waletzky (1967) characterized a narrative as a sequence of temporally related clauses rendered from a particular point of view. That is, narratives include both information about the characters and events of the story, i.e., the plot or referential aspect, as well as comments that relate the narrator’s perspective on their significance to the story, the evaluative aspect of narratives.

Thus, the requisite skills for producing a good narrative involve complex, linguistic, cognitive, and affective/social abilities. Linguistically, children must lexically encode information about the characters and events of the story using the appropriate morphosyntactic devices to articulate the sequence of events and their temporal relations. Cognitively, children must infer the motivation for protagonists’ actions, the logical relations between events and the theme of the story. These inferences might be considered one aspect of the evaluative function as they all reflect the narrator’s assessment of the meaning or significance of the events of the story. Finally, telling a story is a social activity, and an additional type of evaluation concerns the relationship of the narrator to the audience. These elements in a story we have termed social evaluative devices as they serve to engage and maintain the listener’s attention. Given the range of skills required to produce a good narrative, analyzing children’s stories permits us to address questions regarding not only complex language development and its use in school-aged children, but also the relationship of language development to other cognitive and affective abilities. By comparing the narratives of our special populations to those of chronologically matched typically developing children, we can begin to identify which aspects are vulnerable or more resilient in different conditions, as well as those abilities which are closely interrelated versus those which are dissociable from one another.