Young children's narrative retell in response to static and animated stories

The format of narrative prompts used within language assessment has remained relatively constant; however, the use of animated video prompts deserves exploration given the increase in access to technology.

To investigate the effect of story presentation format (static picture book versus animated video) on preschool children's narrative retells. It was hypothesized that children would produce more advanced narrative language elements in response to an animated video than a book.

A total of 73 children between the ages of 3 and 5 years completed two narrative retells. One of these retells was in response to a 3-min animated video presented on a computer; the other retell was in response to static pictures presented in a book format. Children's stories were then transcribed and coded for linguistic and narrative elements.

Paired sample t-tests revealed that children produced significantly longer stories, greater syntactic complexity and lexical variety, and more action verbs when retelling an animated story compared with a book. Furthermore, a post-hoc analysis revealed that examiners provided significantly fewer prompts when eliciting the retell with animation.

Typically developing children demonstrated higher quantity and quality of language within a story retell in response to an animated video than after viewing images from the video presented in a static picture book. Although the extent to which these findings may be similar for children with language disorder has yet to be determined, researchers or clinicians should consider the effect of elicitation procedures on children's retells.