Understanding Plots in Storytelling: An Examination of 9- to 15-Year-Old Thai Children with Intellectual Disabilities

Children with intellectual disabilities (CID) are born with incomplete development of intellectual capabilities. This deficit in intellectual competency is said to affect, to some extent, their language development. The present study aimed to investigate CID’s communicative development, namely plot understanding, from their produced narratives. Participants were 29 9- to 15-year-old Thai CID from Chiang Rai Punyanukul School. The story-retelling technique (Reese et al., 2012) together with the picture book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1967) were used for data collection. Building from Freytag (1894), Berman & Slobin (1994), and Rungrojsuwan (2019a), a modified version of narrative macrostructure including onset, problem, problem-solving, and resolution was used as the analytical framework. Results showed that CID of younger ages, 9 to 11 years old, tended to have a wide range of plot understanding. Some could effectively communicate through narratives as early as 9, while others started their journey as late as 11 or 13. However, 15 years of age seems to be a significant period when CID who were once at different developmental paces, converged. In other words, their developmental gaps reduced and most of them could narrate effectively. Compared with normally developing children, CID are later at the beginning stages, but could finally reach the expected goal of narrative communication.