1. family and parenting
2. children

International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2010; 12(3): 178–189
Profiling oral narrative ability in young school-aged children
MARLEEN F. WESTERVELD & GAIL T. GILLON
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University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Abstract
This study aimed to determine if oral narrative comprehension and production measures derived in a fictional story retelling
task could be used to create a profile of strengths and weaknesses in oral narrative ability (Profile of Oral Narrative Ability:
PONA) in young school-aged children. The story retelling task was field-tested with 169 typically developing children, aged
between 5;0 and 7;6 years. Children listened twice to an unfamiliar story while looking at the pictures in a book.
Comprehension questions were asked after the first exposure. Following the second exposure, children were asked to retell
the story without the use of the pictures. Story retellings were analysed on measures of semantics, morphosyntax, verbal
productivity, and narrative quality. Results indicated sensitivity for age on measures of comprehension, narrative quality,
semantics, and verbal productivity, but not for morphosyntactic measures. Factor analysis indicated that oral narrative
performance comprised three factors, explaining more than 80% of the variance. Two clinical case examples are presented,
which show the potential of the PONA to reveal different patterns of strengths and weaknesses across the oral narrative
measures. Although early evidence suggests the potential usefulness of the PONA, further research is now needed to test the
validity, reliability and clinical application of this tool.
Keywords: Oral narrative skills, language sampling analysis, school-age children.
In the last decade, researchers and clinicians have
become increasingly interested in finding ways in
which children’s oral narrative abilities can be
described in order to assist clinicians in making
clinical judgments about their students’ oral narrative performance (e.g., Bliss, McCabe, & Miranda,
1998; Justice et al., 2006; Petersen, Gillam, &
Gillam, 2008; Strong, 1998). This interest stems
from research indicating that the ability to understand and produce oral narratives is strongly linked
to academic performance, particularly with respect to reading comprehension (e.g., Feagans &
Appelbaum, 1986). Clinical assessment tools can be
divided into standardized tests and criterionreferenced procedures. Although standardized tests
of oral narrative ability will determine if a child
functions significantly below expectations compared
to his or her peers (e.g., Bishop, 2004; Gillam &
Pearson, 2004), in general these tests do not yield the
detail in oral narrative comprehension or production
performance that is needed for intervention. In
contrast, criterion-referenced procedures provide
the clinician with detail about a child’s oral narrative
performance (e.g., Applebee, 1978; Justice et al.,
2006; Petersen et al., 2008). Ideally, both comprehension and production of oral narratives should be
addressed (Boudreau, 2008) and macro- as well as
microstructural aspects of performance should be
included (Liles, Duffy, Merritt, & Purcell, 1995).
The current study, therefore, examined if a story
retelling task that was developed as part of a language sampling protocol (which also included elicitation of conversation and personal narratives, see
Westerveld, Gillon, & Miller, 2004, for a copy of the
protocol) would yield descriptive data in all these
aspects of oral narrative performance to provide the
clinician with a profile of a child’s strengths and
weaknesses in oral narrative ability.
The importance of oral narrative skills for academic
achievement
Research supports the predictive and concurrent
relationship between aspects of oral narrative ability and academic performance (e.g., Feagans &
Appelbaum, 1986). Moreover, studies of oral
narrative performance in children with language
and/or reading disabilities have revealed weaknesses
in these children’s oral narrative ability when
compared to chronologically age-matched and/or
reading-age matched peers (Feagans & Short,
1984; Snyder & Downey, 1991; Westerveld, Gillon,
& Moran, 2008). It is therefore not surprising, that
general consensus exists that oral narrative analysis
Correspondence: Marleen F. Westerveld, PhD, School of Literacies and Arts in Education, College of Education, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800,
Christchurch, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected]
ISSN 1754-9507 print/ISSN 1754-9515 online ª The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited
Published by Informa UK Ltd.
DOI: 10.3109/17549500903194125
Profile of oral narrative ability
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should play a pivotal role in the speech-language
pathologist’s assessment and intervention practices
(Boudreau, 2008; Johnston, 2008). Apart from
standardized testing to confirm or refute language
impairment, international best practice recommends
the use of spontaneous language sampling, not only
to support standardized test results but also to
provide the clinician with the linguistic detail needed
for intervention and monitoring purposes (Gillon,
Moriarty, & Schwarz, 2006; Miller, 1996). Although
a plethora of guidelines have been published on how
to elicit and analyse oral narrative samples (see
Hughes, McGillivray, & Schmidek, 1997), local
field-test data are urgently needed to allow the
clinician to determine a child’s performance relative
to his or her age-matched peers.
Assessment of oral narrative ability
Oral narrative ability can be assessed in two modalities (comprehension and production) and analysed
at two levels (macrostructure and microstructure
levels). From a clinical perspective, a child needs
adequate skills in all of these aspects to meet the ever
increasing higher-level discourse demands of the
school curriculum. Children are exposed to narratives on a daily basis; They are required to listen to
and understand the teacher’s narrative explanations,
are expected to share personal stories and re/tell
fictional stories, and are exposed to written narratives
that increase in complexity as children progress
through the reading levels (Milosky, 1987). Theoretical perspectives on the links between oral narrative
ability and reading comprehension confirm the need
for evaluation of oral narrative ability across domains
and modalities (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994;
Kintsch, 1988). It is thus proposed that analysis of
oral narrative ability may be used to obtain important
information about a child’s spoken language abilities
that are deemed important to academic participation
and reading comprehension (see also Cain, Oakhill,
& Bryant, 2004). More specifically, analysis of oral
narrative comprehension ability will help determine
the child’s ability to understand text-level language
(e.g., Gough & Tunmer, 1986). Analysis of oral
narrative production ability at microstructure level
will potentially provide an indication of the child’s
strengths and weaknesses in the spoken language
domains of semantics, syntax, and morphology,
whereas macrostructure analysis of oral narrative
production ability will provide insight into the child’s
ability to apply narrative structure knowledge and
produce a coherent narrative that contains all the
important story grammar elements (e.g., see Hughes
et al., 1997).
Oral narrative comprehension
Procedures used for assessing oral narrative comprehension include asking the child to act out action
179
units contained in a narrative (Feagans & Short,
1984), asking the child comprehension questions
following exposure to a story (and prior to retelling
that story) (Norbury & Bishop, 2002; Westerveld
et al., 2004), or asking comprehension questions
immediately after a child has retold a story (Liles,
1987; Snyder & Downey, 1991; Wagner, Sahlen, &
Nettelbladt, 1999). Although some researchers support the use of story retell to assess a child’s narrative
understanding (e.g., Skarakis-Doyle & Dempsey,
2008), others argue that comprehension and production of oral narratives may be distinct skills (Wagner
et al., 1999). Even though both methods rely to
some extent on the child’s productive language
abilities, it can be argued that answering questions
may yield more specific information about the
child’s receptive abilities than a story retelling task.
A retelling task is more complex, as it not only
involves the memory processes underlying successful
comprehension but also entails a semantic and
morphosyntactic component (see Mar, 2004).
Merritt and Liles (1989) suggested using comprehension questions following a story retelling
to identify if factors other than expressive spoken
language skills influenced the child’s oral narrative
production performance. The advantage of asking
comprehension questions prior to the story retelling
task is, however, that a more immediate measure of
oral narrative comprehension is obtained (i.e., which
has not been affected by a child’s difficulty to store
information in short-term memory and/or which
has not been influenced by the child’s attempt to
retell the story). Furthermore, previous research has
shown high correlations between story comprehension and the ability to tell the story afterwards both in
children with language impairment and in children
with typically developing skills (Norbury & Bishop,
2002).
Oral narrative elicitation: Context and conditions
Both story generation and story retelling tasks are
used in the research literature to elicit oral narrative
production skills. Examples of generation tasks
include telling a story about a single picture (Justice
et al., 2006; Ripich & Griffith, 1988), completing a
story started by the examiner (Merritt & Liles, 1989),
and creating a story about something that is not real
(Roth & Spekman, 1986). Story retelling tasks can be
described as either spontaneous (e.g., retelling a
familiar story or a TV program) or more directed.
Directed tasks include story productions after movie
viewings (Gummersall & Strong, 1999; Liles, 1985)
and story retelling, with or without pictures, after
listening to a story (with or without pictures) (Ripich
& Griffith, 1988; Schneider, 1996). Merritt and Liles
(1989) found clear advantages to using a story
retelling task rather than a story generation task
for assessing oral narrative production abilities.
Results indicated that retold narratives were
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180
M. F. Westerveld & G. T. Gillon
generally longer and contained more story grammar
components and complete episode structures than
story generations. In addition, generated stories were
often confusing to the listener and, therefore,
difficult to score at macrostructure level.
When asking a child to retell a story, both the
quality and the length of the resulting oral narrative
will depend on the elicitation tasks and the sampling
conditions (Schneider, 1996). Factors that may
influence task performance include the child’s perception of the examiner’s familiarity with the model
story (Masterson & Kamhi, 1991), the number of
exposures to the model story (Gummersall & Strong,
1999), the contextual support for the story (e.g.,
single pictures, picture books, see Masterson &
Kamhi, 1991), and the linguistic complexity and
length of the model story (e.g., Holloway, 1986).
After careful evaluation of the literature, Westerveld
and Gillon (1999/2000) concluded that optimal
sampling conditions for eliciting fictional oral narratives in school-aged children (with and without
spoken language disorders) involved:
.
.
.
.
A listener who is unfamiliar with the story the
child is retelling (Liles, 1985; Masterson &
Kamhi, 1991). For example, Masterson and
Kamhi demonstrated that children retell
longer, grammatically more complex stories
to naive listeners.
Two exposures to the model story (Gummersall
& Strong, 1999). The results from Gummersall
and Strong’s study indicated that a more
informative oral narrative language sample
(containing more words and more complex
syntactic structures) may be obtained if a child
listens to a model story twice, before being
asked to retell the story.
A retell of the story without the support
of picture-sequences (Masterson & Kamhi,
1991). Masterson and Kamhi found that
children’s story retelling samples that were
collected without the support of picture books
contained more compound sentences, higher
lexical accuracy, and better fluency than those
obtained in a picture supported condition. In
contrast, grammatical accuracy decreased in
the absence of pictures.
Stimulus materials that contain levels of
linguistic complexity that are similar to, or
more advanced than the child’s own (Griffith,
Ripich, & Dastoli, 1986; Holloway, 1986).
Oral narrative production measures
Consideration needs to be given to the type of
measures that are included when investigating a
child’s oral narrative performance. Some recent
research studies investigating clinical applications of
scoring systems have focused on relatively complex
measures; one example is the Index of Narrative
Microstructure (INMIS) by Justice et al. (2006) that is
an aggregated score of a child’s performance at
microstructure level. Another example is the Index
of Narrative Complexity (Petersen et al., 2008) that
assigns scores to a range of categories related to oral
narrative performance, including macro- and microstructural aspects. For the current profile of oral
narrative ability it was decided to use transparent,
frequently used microstructure measures of oral
narrative performance that are known to correlate
significantly with advancing age and to be sensitive to
disordered language performance (e.g., Botting,
2002; Boudreau & Hedberg, 1999; Fey, Catts,
Proctor-Williams, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2004;
Watkins, Kelly, Harbers, & Hollis, 1995). These
measures include mean length of utterance, number
of different words and grammatical accuracy. However, consistent with previous studies, to capture the
quality of the oral narrative, a total score will be
assigned that covers a range of characteristics such as
story grammar elements, theme, and coherence (e.g.,
Fey et al., 2004; Miller, Heilmann, & Nockerts, 2006).
The current study
The current study aimed to determine if a Profile of
Oral Narrative Ability (PONA), based on measures
derived from a story retelling task, has clinical utility
with young school-aged children. The story retelling
task was field-tested with 169 typically developing
children, aged between 5;0 and 7;6. Children were
asked comprehension questions following the first
exposure to the story, and story retelling samples
were analysed at macrostructure and microstructure
levels.
Method
Participants
The 169 children in this study were participants in
the New Zealand database project (see Westerveld
et al., 2004). All story retelling transcripts from
children who were aged between 5;0 and 7;6 were
included in the current study. The children were
randomly selected from mainstream primary schools
in major urban areas in New Zealand. Children with
diagnosed disorders such as autism, Down syndrome, and cerebral palsy were excluded prior to the
random selection. The schools reflected a range of
socio-economic areas. Only children who spoke
English as their first language and who had no
history of sensory deficits or neurological disorder
were included in the study. There were slightly more
girls than boys (ranging from 53% to 56% per agegroup). The ethnicity of the groups resembled the
largest cultural groups in New Zealand (Ministry
of Education, 1998) and comprised the following
subcategories: New Zealand European (61.5%),
Maori (20.7%), Pacific peoples (4%), Asian (3%),
Profile of oral narrative ability
and Other (9.8%). Ethnicity was based on the
cultural groups the parents had identified on their
child’s school-enrolment form. Details on the age
and gender distribution of the participants are shown
in Table I.
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Procedures
Elicitation procedures. All testing was conducted by
certified speech pathologists working for Group
Special Education (New Zealand Ministry of Education). These clinicians were trained by the first
author on the elicitation procedures. Each child was
seen individually in the child’s school setting and
was administered the full Westerveld & Gillon
Language Sampling Protocol (LSP). The original
protocol included elicitation of spoken language in
three conditions: conversation, personal narratives,
and story retelling. The protocol has been included
in Westerveld et al. (2004) or can be downloaded from: http://www.education.canterbury.ac.nz/
documents/gillon/languageprotocol.pdf. In addition,
a New Zealand speech and language screening test
(Gillon & Schwarz, 1998) was administered. Any
child who performed very poorly on the receptive
language screening task (i.e., who could not follow
basic instructions) was excluded from the database
study. Children’s language samples were excluded
from the database for reasons such as poor taping
quality or not engaging in the task (i.e., unwilling to
retell the story).
The data presented in the current study relate to
the story retelling condition of the language sampling
protocol. In this context, the child was required to
listen twice to an audio-recording of an unfamiliar
story (while looking at the pictures in a story book).
The story was an English translation of Ko au na
Galo [Ana gets lost] (Swan, 1992). The story is
about a Pacific Islands girl who gets lost in the city,
while looking for her mum and dad. It is a 10-page
reader of the type typically used in Year 1 and Year 2
New Zealand classrooms, with coloured pictures and
Tokelauan text. The original translation of Ko au
na Galo was adapted slightly to add a little further
length and complexity to the story. A transcript of
the story is presented in Appendix A.
Following the first exposure to the story, the child
was asked eight questions about the story to evaluate
story comprehension. To ensure all children had
Table I. Age and gender distribution of the participants.
Age (year;
months)
Female/
Male
Age group
n
Mean
SD
Age range
n
%
5-year-olds
6-year-olds
7-year-olds
39
81
49
5;6
6;5
7;3
0;3
0;3
0;2
5;0 – 5;11
6;0 – 6;11
7;0 – 7;6
22/17
44/37
26/23
56/44
54/46
53/47
181
access to the same information prior to the children
listening to the story for a second time, children were
provided with the correct information after answering the questions if they did not respond to the
question, or if their answers were clearly incorrect.
This method was used to make sure that if children
generated weak stories, they were likely to be the
result of the children’s difficulty in applying story
structure knowledge when retelling the story, rather
than the result of the children’s failure to remember
and/or pay attention to important elements of the
story. Following the second exposure to the story,
the child was asked to retell the story without the use
of pictures.
Transcription procedures. All language samples were
tape-recorded. Samples were transcribed by speech
pathology students who were trained in the standard
Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts-New
Zealand version (SALT-NZ) transcription conventions (Miller & Chapman, 1984–2003). Utterance
segmentation was based on communication units
(CU), using Loban’s (1976) rules. Defined by
Loban, a CU consists of ‘‘each independent clause
with its modifiers and associated independent
clauses, or of an answer to a question lacking only
the repetition of the question elements to satisfy the
criterion of independent predication’’ (p. 9). Only
complete and intelligible (C&I) utterances were used
for analysis; Interrupted and abandoned sentences
were excluded as well as utterances containing
unintelligible segments.
Measures
Oral narrative comprehension (ONC). Each child
was asked eight questions following the first exposure to the story. ONC was calculated as a percent
questions correct score. The questions are listed in
Appendix B.
Microstructure. Only quantitative measures of oral
narrative ability that are relatively easy to compute by
clinicians, that have been shown to distinguish
between children with spoken language impairment
and children with typical development, and that are
likely to change with age or ability were included:
number of different words (NDW, see Miller, 1996;
Watkins et al., 1995), total number of utterances
(UTT), mean length of utterance in morphemes
(MLU-M, see Brown, 1973), and grammatical
accuracy (percent grammatically correct utterances:
GA, see Fey et al., 2004).
Macrostructure. The story retelling transcripts were
analysed at macrostructure level. To evaluate the
child’s ability to apply story structure knowledge
when retelling a story, the story retellings were scored
on a story quality rubric. The rubric was adapted
from Jones and Lodholz (1999) and assessed
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182
M. F. Westerveld & G. T. Gillon
inclusion of six text structure elements: introduction,
main character/s, supporting character/s, conflict,
resolution, and conclusion, as well as a measure of
holistic coherence. It also investigated whether the
child included the theme of the story. Theme is
defined as ‘‘the overall coherent topic of the text and
its essential points’’ (Westby, 2005, p. 162). For
more details or to obtain a copy of the rubric used in
the current study, please contact the first author.
The child was awarded points for each characteristic:
5 points if the child proficiently included the
characteristic, 3 points if the skill was emerging, and
1 point if the child provided minimal or no
information. The rubric includes specific scoring
examples to promote easy and reliable scoring by
other examiners. The scores were totalled to yield
an Oral Narrative Quality (ONQ) score. As a result,
the minimum score was 8 and the maximum score
was 40.
Reliability
Accuracy of transcription and coding of the original
stories was reported in detail in Westerveld et al.
(2004). For the present study, all samples were rechecked by the first author and any transcription or
coding errors that were found were corrected.
For the macrostructure analysis, 20% of the
transcripts were randomly selected and scored by
an independent examiner who was trained in scoring
the stories on the ONQ rubric. Reliability of the total
scores on the ONQ rubric, using Cronbach’s alpha
analysis, was .96. The total scores (of all individual
stories) awarded by the two examiners differed by 4
points or less. For individual characteristic scores,
the scores never differed more than 2 points (i.e., one
category).
Results
Descriptive statistics
Table II reports the means and standard deviations
by age group on the six measures of oral narrative
ability: oral narrative comprehension (ONC), oral
narrative quality (ONQ), mean length of utterance in
morphemes (MLU-M), number of different words
(NDW), number of utterances (UTT) and grammatical accuracy (GA). As expected, there was a general
linear increase in performance with age for all the
measures, except for MLU-M which was the same
for the 6- and 7-year-old age groups.
To determine if the oral narrative measures were
sensitive to age, separate linear regression analyses
were conducted with Age as the independent variable.
The following linear regressions were significant
(p .001): ONC (r ¼ .25), ONQ (r ¼ .35), NDW
(r ¼ .39), UTT (r ¼ .36). The regression was significant at p .05 for GA (r ¼ .16) and not significant for
MLU-M (r ¼ .14). It was noted, however, that there
were 2 outliers (scoring below 3 standard deviations)
when the linear regression was conducted for GA.
When excluding those outliers, the effect of age on GA
was no longer significant (p ¼ .53).
Correlational analyses
To determine internal consistency of the measures,
correlation coefficients between the oral narrative
measures were calculated and are reported in
Table III. This shows that the GA measure was not
correlated to any of the other oral narrative measures. In contrast, all other measures (ONC, ONQ,
MLU-M, NDW, and UTT) showed significant
correlations, except for MLU-M and ONC, and
MLU-M and UTT.
Factor analysis
A principal component factor analysis, using Varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization was conducted, entering all six oral narrative measures. At
first, two factors were identified using eigenvalue 41
as the cutoff value (explaining 49.2% and 16.7% of
the variance respectively). Because the third factor
demonstrated an eigenvalue of .997 and explained an
Table II. Group performance on oral narrative measures.
5-year-olds
6-year-olds
7-year-olds
M
SD
M
SD
M
SD
Comprehension
ONC
6
1.5
6.4
1.4
7
1.2
Production
Macrostructure
ONQ
21.5
5.9
24.5
6.6
28.2
5.9
1.2
13
4
14.9
7.3
49
13
87.9
0.9
16
5
11
7.3
59
16
91.8
0.9
14
4.6
9.8
Measures
Microstructure
MLU-M
NDW
UTT
GA
6.9
40
10.6
86.2
Note: ONC ¼ Oral narrative comprehension, maximum score is 8;
ONQ ¼ oral narrative quality, range of scores is 8–40; MLUM ¼ Mean length of utterance in morphemes; NDW ¼ number of
different words; UTT ¼ total number of utterances; GA ¼ grammatical accuracy in percent grammatically correct utterances.
Table III. Correlations between the oral narrative measures.
Measures
ONC
ONQ
MLU-M
NDW
UTT
GA
ONC
ONQ
MLU-M
NDW
UTT
GA
–
.38**
–
.13
.26*
–
.37**
.79**
.27*
–
.33**
.73**
.01
.93**
–
.19
.18
.03
.14
.13
–
Note: ONC ¼ Oral narrative comprehension; ONQ ¼ Oral narrative quality; MLU-M ¼ Mean length of utterance in morphemes;
NDW ¼ Number of different words; UTT ¼ number of total
utterances; GA ¼ Grammatical accuracy. *correlation is significant
at p 5 .05. **correlation is significant at .001 level.
Profile of oral narrative ability
retelling task, several analyses were conducted. First,
the 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th, and 95th
percentiles were calculated, based on weighted
averages (see Table V). As shown in Table V, median
scores for all oral narrative measures were similar to
mean scores, except for the GA measure in the 5- and
7-year-old age groups. Next, the distribution of the
scores was investigated, using skewness and kurtosis
statistics. Normal distributions have skewness (degree of asymmetry of the distribution around its
mean) and kurtosis (the peakedness or flatness of a
distribution) statistics close to 0. Values of two
standard errors of skewness or more (in this case
4.38) are considered skewed to a significant degree
(Tabachnick & Fidell, 1996). As illustrated in
Table IV, about half of the oral narrative measures
showed a skewed distribution, with the GA measure
showing a very high skewness statistic in every age
group. This indicates that scores for all age-groups on
this measure clustered at the high end of the scale.
The results also showed significantly peaked (positive) and flat (negative) distributions, with around
half of the values greater than two standard errors of
kurtosis (i.e., 4.75).
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additional 16.6% of the variance, it was decided to
retain the third factor. The first factor reflected a
content component and consisted of the variables
NDW, UTT, ONQ and to a lesser extent ONC. The
second factor reflected a grammatical ability component and comprised GA and to a lesser extent
ONC. The third factor reflected a grammatical
complexity component and consisted of MLU-M
(see Table IV). This factor structure did not match
the hypothesized macrostructure and microstructure
components of oral narrative ability, which would
have resulted in loadings of NDW, UTT, GA, and
MLU-M on one factor (microstructure) and ONQ
and perhaps ONC on the second factor (macrostructure).
Distribution statistics
To determine the shape of the distribution of the oral
narrative performance scores derived in the story
Table IV. Rotated factor loadings.
Variables
Factor 1
Factor 2
Factor 3
.394
.950
.957
.854
.011
.094
2.951
49.19
.502
.094
.080
.172
.930
.031
1.002
16.70
.170
.162
7.116
.197
7.047
.984
.997
16.62
ONC
NDW
UTT
ONQ
GA
MLU-M
Eigenvalues
% Variance
183
Case examples
To provide further insights into how the PONA may
potentially assist speech-language pathologists in
clinical practice, two case examples of children with
delayed development are presented: James and
Shelley (pseudonyms used).
James, aged 6 years 3 months, was referred to the
University clinic because of concerns about his
expressive language skills. James has a twin brother,
Note: ONC ¼ Oral narrative comprehension; NDW ¼ Number of
different words; UTT ¼ number of total utterances; ONQ ¼ Oral
narrative quality; GA ¼ Grammatical accuracy; MLU-M ¼ Mean
length of utterance in morphemes.
Table V. Distributional performance and statistics by age on the oral narrative measures.
Age Group
Mean
5-year-olds (n ¼ 39)
NDW
40
UTT
10.6
ONQ
21.5
ONC
6
GA
86
MLU-M
6.9
6-year-olds (n ¼ 81)
NDW
48.5
UTT
13
ONQ
24.5
ONC
6.4
GA
87.9
MLU-M
7.3
7-year-olds (n ¼ 49)
NDW
59
UTT
16
ONQ
28.2
ONC
7
GA
91.8
MLU-M
7.3
Median
SD
5%
10%
25%
50%
75%
90%
95%
Skewness
Kurtosis
39
10
22
6
90
7.1
13.3
4
5.8
1.5
14.9
.2
18
5
14
3
56
5.2
22
6
16
4
61
5.4
32
8
18
5
85
6
38
10
22
6
90
7.1
50
14
25
7
100
7.9
62
15
30.4
8
100
8.5
63
16
32
8
100
8.5
.03
.43
.43
7.66
71.3
.007
7.81
7.61
7.57
.012
1.01
7.9
48
13
24
7
88.9
7.3
16
5
6.6
1.4
11
.9
25
6
12
4
66.7
5.8
29
7
16
4
77.8
6.1
36
9
20
6
81.8
6.7
48
12
24
7
88.9
7.3
62
17
28
7
95.2
7.9
69
20
34
8
100
8.4
77
22
36
8
100
8.5
.25
.29
.036
7.82
71.59
7.184
7.95
7.9
7.45
.11
4.8
7.53
63
17
28
7
94.4
7.2
14.4
4.6
5.9
1.2
9.8
.9
35
8
18
5
73.3
5.9
37
9
20
5
77.9
6.1
50
13
24
6
88.2
6.8
63
17
28
7
94.4
7.2
69
19
32
8
100
7.8
73
21
35
8
100
8.4
76
21.6
38
8
100
8.5
7.71
7.28
7.17
7.97
71.36
.41
.29
7.66
7.32
.025
1.73
.9
Note: NDW ¼ number of different words; UTT ¼ total number of utterances; ONQ ¼ oral narrative quality, range of scores is 8–40;
ONC ¼ Oral narrative comprehension, maximum score is 8; GA ¼ grammatical accuracy in percent grammatically correct utterances; MLUM ¼ Mean length of utterance in morphemes.
184
M. F. Westerveld & G. T. Gillon
Table VI. James’ performance on the PONA.
Performance
95
90
75
50
25
10
5
NDW
38
UTT
12
ONQ
24
X
X
ONC
2
GA
58.3%
X
X
MLU-M
6.17
X
X
Int J Speech Lang Pathol Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Hebrew University on 05/25/15
For personal use only.
Note: NDW ¼ number of different words; UTT ¼ total number of utterances; ONQ ¼ oral narrative quality, range of scores is 8–40;
ONC ¼ Oral narrative comprehension, maximum score is 8; GA ¼ grammatical accuracy in percent grammatically correct utterances; MLUM ¼ Mean length of utterance in morphemes. Performance is displayed (X) as a percentile score. The shaded area indicates performance
below the average range.
was born at 32 weeks’ gestation, and showed some
delay in developmental milestones. James and his
brother started school on their fifth birthday.
Although James had received speech-language therapy intervention in the past, he was not receiving
intervention at the time of the study. As part of the
routine assessment battery, the following tests were
administered: Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, Preschool-2nd Edition (Wiig, Secord, &
Semel, 2004): Core Language standard score (SS)
63, Receptive language SS 72, Expressive language
SS 66; Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-3rd
Edition (PPVT-III Dunn & Dunn, 1997): SS 86.
Preschool and Primary Inventory of Phonological
Awareness (PIPA; Dodd, Crosbie, McIntosh,
Teitzel, & Ozanne, 2000): rhyme awareness SS 3
and phoneme segmentation SS 7. Spontaneous
language was elicited in a personal narrative and a
story retelling condition, using the Westerveld &
Gillon LSP (see also Westerveld et al., 2004). When
comparing 50 complete and intelligible utterances
derived in the personal narrative context to the
database of New Zealand language samples integrated into SALT (Miller et al., 2008), the standard
measures profile report indicated below average
performance on measures of semantics (NDW) and
morphosyntax (high number of omitted words and
word errors). Table VI shows James’ profile or oral
narrative ability, using the story retelling task of Ana
gets lost, and the transcript is included in Appendix
C. As shown in Table VI, James showed adequate
performance on content measures, but demonstrated
difficulty in grammatical complexity and grammatical ability. More specifically, he provided a sufficient
number of utterances to retell the story (UTT),
showed satisfactory performance on the oral
narrative quality (ONQ) measure, and scored in
the 25th percentile for NDW. However, he demonstrated significant difficulties on measures of comprehension (ONC), and grammar (MLU-M and
GA). Further inspection of the ONQ score shows a
weakness in the coherence characteristic and particular difficulty with the story grammar parts of
introduction and conflict.
Shelley, aged 6 years 8 months, was referred for
speech-language pathology evaluation as a potential
candidate for a research project, because of teacher
concerns about her language and literacy skills. As
part of the routine assessment battery, the following
tests were administered: Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI; Brown et al., 1997): SS 93; Clinical
Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-3rd Edition
(Semel et al., 1995): Total Language SS 65,
Receptive language SS 65, Expressive language SS
69; PPVT-III: SS 83. Neale Analysis of Reading
Ability-3rd Edition (NARA; Neale, 1999): Reading
accuracy percentile rank (PR) score 16, reading
comprehension PR 10. Spontaneous language was
elicited in a personal narrative and a story retelling
condition, using the Westerveld and Gillon LSP (see
Westerveld et al., 2004). When comparing 50
complete and intelligible utterances derived in the
personal narrative context to the SALT-NZ database,
the standard measures profile report indicated
significant difficulties in areas of semantics (NDW)
and morpho-syntax (MLU-M and grammatical
accuracy). Table VII shows Shelley’s profile of oral
narrative ability and the transcript is included in
Appendix C. As shown in Table VII, Shelley’s
performance was below the level expected for her
age on all measures of oral narrative performance, but
consistent with standardized language testing.
Further analysis of the ONQ score shows immature
to emerging performance across all characteristics.
Discussion
The current study aimed to determine if the profile
of oral narrative ability (PONA) based on the results
of a story retelling task has clinical utility with young
school-aged children. The story retelling task comprised a comprehension and a retelling component.
Children’s retelling skills were analysed at macrostructure (oral narrative quality) and microstructure
measures (semantic and morphosyntactic ability as
well as story length). The task was field-tested with a
representative sample of 169 typically developing
children, aged between 5;0 and 7;6 years.
Profile of oral narrative ability
185
Table VII. Shelley’s performance on the PONA.
Performance
95
90
75
50
25
10
5
NDW
28
UTT
7
X
X
ONQ
18
X
ONC
4
GA
58.1%
MLU-M
6.43
X
X
X
Int J Speech Lang Pathol Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Hebrew University on 05/25/15
For personal use only.
Note: NDW ¼ number of different words; UTT ¼ total number of utterances; ONQ ¼ oral narrative quality, range of scores is 8–40;
ONC ¼ Oral narrative comprehension, maximum score is 8; GA ¼ grammatical accuracy in percent grammatically correct utterances; MLUM ¼ Mean length of utterance in morphemes. Performance is displayed (X) as a percentile score. The shaded area indicates performance
below the average range.
Descriptive analyses
First, it was examined if the oral narrative measures
derived from the story retelling task were sensitive to
age. Regression analyses revealed sensitivity for age
for measures of comprehension (ONC), narrative
quality (ONQ), semantic diversity (NDW), and
number of utterances (UTT). In contrast, there
were no age-related changes in measures of grammatical complexity (MLU-M) and grammatical
accuracy (GA). Closer inspection of the MLU-M
measure (see Table II) reveals an increase in MLUM from 5 to 6 years, and no change between 6 and 7
years. This seems a reflection of the MLU-M
measure, rather than the task, as similar trends have
been observed in previous studies. For example,
Justice et al. (2006) analysed performance on a story
generation task and noticed a linear increase in
MLU from 5 to 7 years and then a decrease in
performance on the MLU-M measure from 7 to 8
years. In contrast, Leadholm and Miller (1992)
observed very similar performances when comparing
5- to 6-year-olds on the MLU-M measure (based
on 100 utterances derived in a narrative context),
followed by an increase in MLU from 6 to 7 years.
When inspecting the GA measure in the current
study, a linear upward trend was seen from 5 to 7
years of age, but no significant differences were
found between the different age groups. Other
researchers who have used this measure also found
little variation with age for typically developing
children (Fey et al., 2004). Despite the finding that
the MLU-M and GA measures did not show a
significant increase with age, results from previous
studies demonstrating these measures’ sensitivity to
language ability support the importance of including
these measures in the PONA (Fey et al., 2004; Liles
et al., 1995; Scott & Windsor, 2000). However,
further research investigating the performance of
groups of children with language impairment on the
PONA is needed to confirm this hypothesis.
Descriptive statistics revealed that performance on
the oral narrative measures was not always normally
distributed. Although the median scores were generally
close to the mean scores, ONC and GA in particular
showed scores that were clustered onto the high end of
the scale. The obvious explanation concerns ceiling
effects for ONC and GA, with 10–25% of the children
in all age groups responding correctly to all comprehension questions and producing 100% grammatically
correct utterances to retell the story.
The lack of a normal distribution of scores on some
narrative microstructure measures at each age group
was not unexpected, as previous research has shown a
generally large variability in performance on oral
narrative tasks (e.g., Justice et al., 2006; Liles et al.,
1995). The debate on whether language sampling
analysis can be standardized is likely to continue (e.g.,
Miller, Heilmann, Nockerts, Andriacchi, & Iglesias,
2006), until, as Justice and her colleagues argued, a
theoretical explanation can be found for these ‘‘distributional irregularities’’ (Justice et al., 2006, p. 187).
Although this inherent variability in oral narrative
performance affects its potential for norm-referencing
and indicates that the results should be used with
caution, it should not rule out its use in clinical
practice. It is thus proposed that the PONA may be
used by clinicians as part of their language assessment
battery to determine a child’s relative performance
compared to his or her peers.
Analysis of the correlational data showed consistently strong correlations between ONC, NDW,
ONQ, and UTT. MLU-M only showed significant
correlations with ONQ and NDW, whereas GA
was not significantly correlated to any of the other
measures. The factor analysis yielded three dimensions, a content factor (containing NDW, UTT,
ONQ and to a lesser extent ONC), a grammatical
ability factor (comprising GA and to a lesser extent
ONC), and a grammatical complexity factor
(consisting of MLU-M). These findings do not seem
to confirm the hypothesized distinction between
microstructure and macrostructure measures and
appear to contradict results from previous research in
this area (Liles et al., 1995). Liles et al. conducted a
factor analysis of oral narrative measures derived in
story retelling conditions, which showed two
distinct categories, referred to as ‘‘Content Organization’’ (macro-level) and ‘‘Linguistic Structure’’
(more local level) (p. 421). The measures under
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186
M. F. Westerveld & G. T. Gillon
investigation in the Liles et al. study included: (1)
Content factor: total number of episodes, ratio of
possible episodes, ratio of complete cohesive ties,
and (2) Linguistic structure factor: mean number of
words per subordinate clause, mean number of
subordinate clauses per utterance, and ratio of
grammatical utterances. Interestingly, the mean
number of words per main clause measure did not
load on the matrix at all. There are several possible
explanations for the differences in findings between
the current study and the Liles et al. (1995) study.
First, different oral narrative measures were used in
the studies, which accounted for only 41.3% of the
variance in Liles et al. study, compared to over 82%
in the current study. For example, Liles et al. did not
include a NDW measure. Based on results from the
current study, it seems reasonable to expect that
NDW would have loaded on to the Content
Organization factor in the Liles et al. study. In
addition, Liles et al. did not include a comprehension measure, which could have accounted for
additional variance. Second, the current study uses
a much larger sample of participants, which may
have provided stronger factor loadings.
Another finding from the factor analysis relates to
the separate loadings of the GA and the MLU-M
measure, indicating these measures tap different
constructs. Results from Justice et al. (2006) also
showed that microstructure measures of oral narrative performance did not represent a single construct.
When analysing oral narrative production measures
derived from a story generation task (n ¼ 250, age
5–12 years), factor analysis revealed two factors,
accounting for a combined 76.3% of the variance.
One factor (labelled productivity) contained measures of TNW, NDW, story length, number of
coordinating conjunctions, number of subordinating
conjunctions, and number of complex sentences.
The second factor (complexity) contained measures
of MLU and proportion of complex sentences. The
authors admitted, however, that the factor loadings
did not match the hypothesized productivity and
complexity loadings. In summary, results from the
current study confirm that oral narrative performance taps multiple underlying factors (Justice et al.,
2006; Liles et al., 1995) and highlight the importance
of analysing oral narratives on a range of measures.
Future research should consider a wider range of
oral narrative measures to further investigate the
dimensionality of oral narrative performance.
Case studies
The two case studies, James and Shelley, showed the
potential application of the PONA for assessment
and intervention practices. The percentile scores
for the oral narrative measures (see Table V) can be
used to create a profile of a child’s strength and
weaknesses in oral narrative performance across
these measures. Interestingly, although James and
Shelley showed similar performance on a broad
spectrum standardized language test, their performance on the PONA differed. As shown in Tables VI
and VII, James’ strengths were in measures tapping
semantic ability, including number of different
words, oral narrative quality and the number of
utterances used to retell the story. In contrast,
Shelley demonstrated difficulties in all aspects of
oral narrative ability, indicating both semantic and
grammatical problems. Further inspection of the
children’s performance on the story quality rubric as
well as analysis of the types of grammatical errors
produced during story retelling will add further detail
to the results obtained with the PONA. As a result,
and consistent with evidence-based practice, these
data can inform the programming of intervention
goals to specifically address areas of weakness in oral
narrative performance.
Limitations of the study and future directions
One limitation of the current study is the limited
sensitivity of the ONC and GA measures. However,
this may be due to the task that was used: a 10-page
picture book with a relatively short story. For
typically developing 5- to 7-year-old children this
task may not have been sufficiently challenging,
resulting in ceiling effects on both of these
measures. Despite the skewed distribution for both
these measures, however, the mean scores were
close to the median scores and the percentile scores
showed a linear increase. Furthermore, the case
examples highlighted the difficulties on these two
measures demonstrated by the two children with
language impairment. In addition, results from our
research involving children with reading disability
showed performance on this oral narrative task to
differentiate between poor readers and their typically developing peers on the ONC and the ONQ
measures (Westerveld et al., 2008) and on the
MLU-M and the GA measures (Westerveld, Gillon,
& Miller, 2006). Further research with larger
groups of children is needed to determine if the
PONA can reliably differentiate children with
language impairment from their typically developing
peers.
The PONA should be used with caution with
children from different cultural and/or linguistic
backgrounds. The results from a pilot study
investigating the performance of 6-year-old children from Maori, Pacific peoples, and New
Zealand European backgrounds revealed no differences in performance between the cultural groups
on a range of oral narrative measures (Westerveld
& Gillon, 2001). It is not clear, however, if these
findings can be extended to younger children or to
children for whom English is their second language. Future research should consider culturallinguistic styles that may influence performance
on the PONA to help distinguish disordered
Profile of oral narrative ability
Int J Speech Lang Pathol Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Hebrew University on 05/25/15
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performance from cultural differences in oral
narrative performance (see also Gutierrez-Clellen,
Pen˜a, & Quinn, 1995).
It is not clear if the PONA can be used
to demonstrate progress in oral narrative ability
following intervention. Because the story is short, a
learning effect may be evident, and further study of
the story retelling task to determine test-retest validity is clearly needed. The PONA should not be
used as a screening measure until further research
into this application is conducted. Until then, its
purpose is to provide clinicians with local field test
data that can be used as an addition to their battery
of language assessments.
Conclusion
The PONA provides the clinician with an overview
of a young school-aged child’s strengths and weaknesses in several aspects of oral narrative performance compared to his/her typically developing
peers. However, clinicians should be careful not
to use the story retelling sample as the basis for a
full microstructure analysis. It is well established
that analysis of at least 50 complete and intelligible
utterances is needed to perform a comprehensive
analysis of children’s semantic, syntactic, and
morphological skills (Miller, 1996). Therefore, the
PONA shows potential to be used as one aspect of
the clinician’s assessment battery to describe children’s spoken language performance. This profile
of oral narrative ability will then contribute to the
clinical evaluation of a child’s spoken language ability
and will potentially provide detailed direction for oral
narrative intervention.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the children and the
children’s parents and class teachers for their
cooperation in the database project. Thanks are also
extended to the speech-language pathologists who
assisted in the data collection process. The support
of the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the New
Zealand Speech-Language Therapists’ Association
and the Don Bevan Travel Scholarship was greatly
appreciated. Finally, this project would not have
been possible without the assistance from Professor
Jon Miller and Ann Nockerts from SALT Software,
LLC.
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Profile of oral narrative ability
Appendix A
189
Appendix C
Story retelling by James and Shelley
Int J Speech Lang Pathol Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Hebrew University on 05/25/15
For personal use only.
Ana Gets Lost (Swan, 1992)
One Saturday morning, Ana’s mum and dad went
fishing on the beach.
Ana had been sick all week, so she had to stay at
home with her big brother Tom.
She asked Tom if he wanted to play with her.
‘‘No thanks’’, he said, ‘‘I want to read a sports
magazine’’.
Ana got bored.
So when Tom fell asleep, she decided to go
looking for her mum and dad.
She quietly opened the front door and went
outside.
Ana walked towards the beach, but she got lost.
She kept walking until it got dark.
Ana got very scared and she started to cry.
She stopped outside a dairy.
She was still crying and didn’t know what to
do.
Then Ana felt a pat on her shoulder.
She looked around and saw a policeman.
‘‘Hello’’, he said, ‘‘are you Ana?’’
‘‘Yes,’’ said Ana, giving him a big smile.
The policeman took Ana home in the police
car.
Mum and dad were very happy to see Ana.
They thanked the policeman for finding Ana and
bringing her home safely.
The policeman told Ana not to get lost again.
Then he smiled and drove away.
Appendix B
Comprehension questions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Who is the story about?
Why did Ana have to stay at home?
Why did Ana get bored?
Where did Ana go to find her parents?
Why did Ana get scared?
Who found Ana?
What did the policeman do?
Why were Ana’s parents happy
to see her?
Story retelling by James, aged 6;3 years
C (uhm) she (uhm) she walked to town.
C she we* {yawns}4
E what was the story about?
C (uhm) Ana.
E uhuh.
E anything else you can remember?
C (uh) she got lost.
E uhuh.
C and she cried and cried.
C (and then got when) when the sky got dark and dark [NGA].
E ok.
C and she asked (her brother to can) his brother to play with her
[NGA].
E ok, and then?
C (she wa* she she w*) she quietly open the front door [NGA].
C and (she she) she got lost.
E oh and anything else you can remember?
C (and) and (uhm) the police (asked her to uhm uhm) pat him on
the shoulder [NGA].
C and (uhm she she uhm) he got her back home.
E oh 5and4.
C (5a*4) and his parents got happy [NGA].
C and the man told her (uhm uhm) not to get lost again.
C ¼ child; E ¼ examiner. Mazes (reformulations, filled pauses) are
put in brackets. [NGA] ¼ not grammatically accurate. * indicates
unfinished word. 4indicates unfinished sentence.5 4indicates
overlapping speech.
ONQ score: 24
Introduction 1; Theme 5; Main characters: 3; Supporting characters: 3; Conflict: 1; Coherence: 1; Resolution: 5; Conclusion: 5.
ONC score: 2. James correctly answered questions 6 and 7.
Story retelling by Shelley, aged 6;8 years
C Ana got lost.
E uhuh and then?
C and (then) then she open the door quietly [NGA].
C and (she thought she has t* she x) she has to find her mum [NGA].
E uhuh and then?
C (uhm and then she) the police took her home back to her mum
and dad.
E uhuh.
C and her brother.
E uhuh and then?
C then (uhm) Annie (had) had a smile and then waved [NGA].
E 5yes4.
C 5and the4 police (go*) was gone.
ONQ score: 18
Introduction: 1; Theme: 3; Main character: 5; Supporting characters:1; Conflict: 1; Coherence: 1; Resolution: 3; Conclusion: 3.
ONC score: 4. Shelley correctly answered questions 1, 5, 6 and 7.