Instrumento MAIN para evaluar las habilidades narrativas en niños hispanohablantes con trastorno del desarrollo del lenguaje (TDL)

Abstract

Introduction

Developmental language disorder (DLD) involves the impairment of one or more linguistic dimensions. It has been observed that these children present difficulties in oral narratives at the microstructure and macrostructure levels, although there is much disparity in the assessment tools used in research. The aim of this study is to assess the narrative skills of Spanish-speaking children with DLD by analyzing oral narratives in terms of narrative microstructure and macrostructure and phonological and morphological errors.

Method

The sample consisted of 24 children: 12 with DLD and 12 with typical development (TD) aged between 7 and 11 years. They were administered CELF-5, Raven's 2, and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test to assess the level of linguistic and cognitive competence and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), a narrative assessment tool. These oral narratives were transcribed and analyzed with the CHILDES project tools and coded with the PREP-CORP system.

Results

Statistically significant differences were observed between both groups in the number of utterances, mean utterance length and number of events narrated, as well as in the frequency of morphological and phonological errors.

Conclusions

Oral narratives of DLD children using the MAIN tool are shorter and less detailed than those of TD, as well as with a higher number of phonological and morphological errors. Therefore, the MAIN could be a suitable clinical tool for the assessment of the narrative skills of DLD children.