Children's story retelling under different modality and task conditions: implications for standardizing language...

This study was motivated by the possibility of standardizing a story-retelling task well enough to function as a brief screener of children's global syntactic features. Specifically, the study determined whether the story presentation modality (i.e., audio-only or combined auditory and visual presentation) differentially influenced the quantity of talk, its lexical diversity and sentence complexity, as expressed in children's retold story narratives and responses to direct questions about the story. Twenty-nine Caucasian male pre-schoolers, who ranged in age from 4;2 to 5;6 (years;months), were randomly assigned to a modality presentation condition. The audio-only group did not differ significantly from the audiovisual group in the amount of talk, lexical diversity, or syntactic complexity of sentences used in the narratives or responses to direct questions. Nevertheless, the story-retelling task yielded the longest and most grammatically complete utterances. Responses to direct questions yielded the largest number of utterances and different words. The clinical implications of these results for standardizing language sampling are discussed.