Narrative analysis: clinical applications of story generation and story retelling

Narratives were produced by groups of language-disordered and nonimpaired children ages 9:0-11:4 (years:months) in story generation and story retelling tasks. The stories were analyzed in terms of the number of story grammar components, number of complete episodes, relative frequency of story components, and story length. For both groups of children, the results indicated strong overall homogeneity between story generation and story retelling. The retold narratives were longer and contained more story grammar components and complete episode structures for both groups of children. Clause length within complete episodes differentiated story generation from story retelling for the language-disordered children but not for the control group. The clinical advantages of using story retelling in language assessment are discussed.