Elsevier

Journal of Communication Disorders

Volume 44, Issue 1, January–February 2011, Pages 1-22
Journal of Communication Disorders

Mothers’ autobiographical memory and book narratives with children with specific language impairment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2010.06.002Get rights and content

Abstract

This study examined the role that mothers’ scaffolding plays in the autobiographical memory (AM) and storybook narratives of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Seven 4–5-year-old children and their mothers co-constructed narratives in both contexts. We also compared children's narratives with mothers to their narratives with an experimenter. Narratives were assessed in terms of narrative style (i.e., elaborativeness) and topic control. Mothers’ elaborative and repetitive questions during AM and book narratives were related to children's elaborations, whereas mothers’ elaborative and repetitive statements were not. Mothers produced more topic-controlling utterances than children in both contexts; however, both mothers and children provided proportionally more information in the book context. Additionally, children were more elaborative with mothers compared to an experimenter.

Learning outcomes: Readers will be able to: (1) understand the importance of mother-child narratives for both typical and clinical populations; (2) understand how mother-child autobiographical memory and storybook narratives may differ between typical and clinical populations; and (3) consider the implications for designing narrative intervention studies for language impaired children.

Introduction

Narratives are a popular language assessment tool for children with language impairments as they provide a particularly rich assessment of language abilities. Narrative abilities also seem to be particularly informative in terms of predicting later outcomes. For example, Botting, Faragher, Smikin, Knox, and Conti-Ramsden (2001) found that narrative skills of language impaired children at age 7 were most predictive of language diagnosis at age 11, above and beyond measures of receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, articulation, and nonverbal intelligence. Thus, examining narrative skills of young children with language impairments may be particularly useful for identifying children at continued risk for language impairment. Because of the importance of narrative development for children with language impairments, researchers have pointed to the importance of examining how the narrative interactions of parents and their language impaired preschoolers can benefit the language skills of these children (e.g., Crain-Thoreson & Dale, 1999).

The population of interest for the current study is preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI). Children with SLI are defined as being delayed in language in the absence of any related cognitive, emotional, physical, or hearing disability (Leonard, 1998, Tomblin et al., 1997). The current study assessed the narratives of mothers and their children with SLI in the context of autobiographical memory (AM) and storybook narratives. We were also interested in how children's narratives differed under a supported (i.e., mother–child) versus a non-supported (i.e., experimenter–child) context. Because this study is somewhat exploratory, our sample size is small and largely descriptive. However, the rich amount of data this study provides is a significant starting point for future research on AM narratives of mothers and their children with SLI, as this context has not yet been explored in this population.

From a Vygotskian perspective, typically developing children learn narrative skill through the scaffolding provided by parents in a supportive interactive environment. Parents model how to participate in narrative activities starting in the preschool years as children become more competent conversational partners (Vygotsky, 1978), and research shows that narratives of scaffolded children are more complex and rich than those that are not scaffolded (Hudson, 1993, McCabe and Peterson, 1991, Peterson and McCabe, 1994). In terms of mother–child book reading, mothers provide a supportive environment for their child to learn the forms and functions of reading stories and elicit the appropriate responses from their children when possible. Bus (2003) asserts that because children are initially unfamiliar with the structure of storybooks and how they are communicated, that children need parents to help them bridge this gap. Additionally, caregivers often provide a model of narrative that is slightly more advanced than their child's communicative abilities, resulting in an optimization of the child's opportunity to learn from the interaction (Arnold, Lonigan, & Whitehurst, 1994).

Researchers have found that adults do a great deal of discussion when reading books to younger children (Vigil and van Kleeck, 1996, van Kleeck and Beckley-McCall, 2002), and that the nature of this discussion is related to children's participation. For example, adult questions elicit more information than adult comments, and children's responses are more complex in response to mothers’ wh-questions compared to mothers’ comments (van Kleeck, 2004). Furthermore, intervention studies with children with typical language skills have shown that training parents in a particular style of reading referred to as dialogic reading, which includes asking the child open-ended questions, encouraging the child to play an active role in storytelling, and following up what the child says, results in an increase in children's language skill and participation during parent–child book reading (Sénéchal et al., 1995, Sénéchal, 1997, Whitehurst et al., 1994a, Whitehurst et al., 1994b, Whitehurst et al., 1988).

Examining how mothers of children with SLI scaffold children's narratives is particularly important as many researchers have reported on the difficulties that children with SLI have with narrative production when producing narratives on their own. For example, they tend to make more syntactic errors (Norbury and Bishop, 2003, Pearce et al., 2003), provide less information (Bishop and Donlan, 2005, Kaderavek and Sulzby, 2000), provide more inappropriate utterances (Brinton, Fujiki, & Powell, 1997), produce narratives that are less complex (e.g., goal direction; Pearce et al., 2003), and produce narratives that are rated as lower in quality (e.g., organization, clarity; McFadden & Gillam, 1996) than typically developing children.

Despite these difficulties, however, children with SLI do benefit from parent–scaffolded narrative interactions. Most studies of parents’ narrative interactions with children with SLI have focused on the context of book reading as this is a very practical context for mothers to interact with children. Intervention studies with mothers and their preschool children with SLI in book reading interactions have shown that parents who are encouraged to ask more wh-questions, to follow up children's utterances, and to expand on children's utterances can increase children's participation and vocabulary growth (Dale et al., 1996, McNeill and Fowler, 1999, Yoder et al., 1994). These strategies are particularly relevant for children with SLI because these children tend to ask fewer questions, initiate new topics less often, and disregard their mothers’ utterances more often compared to typically developing children (Marvin and Wright, 1997, van Kleeck and Vander Woude, 2003). Furthermore, mothers of children with SLI tend to reduce the linguistic demands on children during book reading interactions, for example, by asking yes–no questions instead of open-ended questions (Crow, 2000) or by being more directive (Kaderavek & Sulzby, 1998).

In addition to book reading, another narrative form that emerges during the preschool years is AM narratives, which has been extensively examined in children with typically developing language skills (see Fivush et al., 2006, Nelson and Fivush, 2004 for reviews). AM narratives share many aspects of storybook narratives in that AM narratives require the narrator to temporally sequence events and provide contextual information, such as who was there, where the event took place, and what happened during the event. However, AM narratives differ from storybook narratives in that they require narration of an event that occurred in the past, and thus require mental representation of that event whereas narration of a storybook is done with the aid of pictures.

Advocates of the social interaction model of AM emphasize the importance of how parents scaffold children's AM narratives (Fivush and Reese, 1992, Hudson, 1990). In the earliest stages of memory talk (i.e., around age 3), parents scaffold children's narratives by asking questions and providing feedback in an attempt to help them remember an event, and initially children rely on these cues to recall information. AM researchers have focused on the importance of mothers’ elaborations (i.e., provision of new information) in facilitating children's AM narratives. Researchers have argued that elaborative questions, particularly open-ended questions, are facilitative of typically developing children's AM development because these questions function to provide children with new information about the event, but also to elicit children's participation in the recall (Farrant and Reese, 2000, Fivush et al., 2006). High-elaborative parents give their children more unique information and provide more descriptive information than do low-elaborative parents (Fivush, 1994). Consequently, children whose parents are high-elaborative remember more information (McCabe and Peterson, 1991, Reese et al., 1993). Furthermore, mothers’ elaborations appear to play a causal role in children's later ability to recall memories above and beyond children's own earlier memory abilities (Reese et al., 1993).

Researchers have also been interested in mothers’ level of autonomy support during AM narratives. Parents who are high on autonomy support are less likely to control the conversation about the past event and to follow their child's lead. Thus, parents high in autonomy support are allowing their children to have more independence in co-constructing the narrative. Cleveland and Reese (2005) found that mothers who were both high-elaborative and autonomy supportive had preschoolers who gave the most memory information in conversations about the past. Thus, typically developing children's AM memory is benefited most by parents who are high-elaborative, ask open-ended elaborative questions, and support their children's autonomy.

Only a few studies have elicited AM narratives from children with SLI. However, children's narratives were not scaffolded by mothers in these studies. Miranda, McCabe, and Bliss (1998) found that 8–9-year olds with SLI had greater difficulty producing independent AM narratives than control groups matched on language ability and age in terms of topic maintenance, event sequencing, and explicitness. Additionally, Goldman (2008) found that 9–13-year olds with SLI produced fewer story elements in their AM narratives (e.g., comments about places, actions, etc.) compared to a control group matched on age. Kaderavek and Sulzby (2000) found that only half of their sample of preschoolers with SLI was able to produce an AM narrative whereas all of the children matched for language could. Furthermore, the youngest child with SLI to produce an AM narrative was 3:1 whereas the youngest control subject was 2:4. In addition, mothers read a book with children, who were later asked to retell the story. For the emergent reading, children with SLI were more comparable to the control group. Thus, it seems that children with SLI were better able to produce a narrative when their mothers first provided them with support.

AM narratives may be particularly important for children with SLI because they represent a naturally occurring topic of conversation not only with parents but also with other adults and peers. Results from these three studies suggest, however, that children with SLI may have difficulty producing AM narratives without the scaffolding of an adult. It is important to understand the circumstances that may promote the ability to tell an AM narrative at an earlier age when this ability first emerges (i.e., the preschool years). Considering the important role of parents’ scaffolding of typically developing children's AM narratives and the book narratives of children with SLI, it is surprising that no studies have examined the mother–child AM narratives of children with SLI.

Furthermore, research with typically developing preschoolers suggests that mothers’ elaborative questions and statements promote children's participation in the AM narrative, whereas mothers’ repetitions are seen negatively. Specifically, repetitive mothers are described as providing shorter conversations, less embellishment, and less narrative structure; and this style has not been shown to elicit children's participation (e.g., Cleveland and Reese, 2005, Farrant and Reese, 2000, Reese and Fivush, 1993). However, this same pattern may not classify children with SLI, as mothers often use a more directive style to encourage children's participation in book reading interactions and in conversation (Grimm, 1995, Kaderavek and Sulzby, 1998). Conti-Ramsden (1995) pointed out that whereas parents of children with SLI are indeed more directive and controlling in their conversations, children with SLI are also more unreceptive than their normally developing peers in terms of conversational style (Conti-Ramsden and Friel-Patti, 1983, Conti-Ramsden and Friel-Patti, 1984). Parents may have to use a more directive conversational style to keep the conversation going, and to accomplish some amount of involvement from the child (Conti-Ramsden, 1995).

Thus, mothers’ AM style with children with SLI is of practical importance. Several interventions have been conducted to promote storybook narratives of mothers and children with SLI (e.g., Crain-Thoreson and Dale, 1999, Crowe et al., 2000, Justice et al., 2005). However, in order to understand what behaviors should be targeted in narrative interventions for other contexts, such as AM narratives, we must first explore what behaviors elicit participation of children with SLI in the AM context as this has not been examined in this population.

Section snippets

The current study

The overarching goal of this study was to examine the AM narratives of mothers and their children with SLI. We had three main aims. First, we examined mothers’ scaffolding of their children's AM narratives. Second, we compared mother–child AM narratives to mother–child storybook narratives, as the latter context has been studied more extensively in terms of the role of mothers’ scaffolding of children with SLI. We compared these contexts both in terms of style (i.e., elaborativeness) as well as

Participants

Seven mother–child dyads participated in this study. The participants were recruited from a speech and hearing center preschool program, in which only children qualified for language services based on Florida state standards were enrolled. As shown in Table 1, children ranged in age from 50 to 68 months. There were four girls and three boys in this sample, and families were predominantly middle-class. As shown in Table 1, two mothers had a high school education, one mother had 3 years of

Results

The majority of our analyses concern correlations between the frequencies of mothers’ and children's variables. Descriptive data for each style variable in both contexts are provided in Table 2. For the AM context, children recalled 3 events. Thus, descriptive data is given for the total across all 3 events. Any comparisons between the AM and the storybook context, however, were examined using proportions as the different contexts may present different task demands. Thus, proportions are also

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine the co-construction of AM narratives of mothers and their children with SLI, to compare AM narratives to book narratives in terms of style and topic control, and to compare scaffolded and unscaffolded child narratives. This study provided a first step in examining what the mother–scaffolded AM narratives of children with SLI are like. Although our results are preliminary, they provide valuable information regarding the behaviors that may support this

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Monroe Regional Medical Center for allowing us access to their facility and for their helpfulness in this project, and for all of the families that participated in this study. We would like to thank Janelle Publications for supplying a demo copy of the SPELT for use in this study. Finally, we gratefully recognize Bonnie Johnson for her expertise and guidance on this project.

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