Narratives: A window on the oral substrate of written language disabilities

Oral precursors underlying competence with literacy activities are approached through a review of studies on narrative comprehension and production in children identified as language learning disabled (LLD). Areas addressed include a general overview of narrative types, the kinds of narrative knowledge that are acquired, the nature of story organization, and developmental acquisitions in story recall and generation. Nine studies on the oral comprehension and production of language learning disabled children are then compared with respect to methodological issues and patterns of performance. Implications from these studies are discussed in terms of their potential insight for subtypes of a LLD including the value of oral narratives in identifying precursors for competence with written language.