Gabaj Mateja, Kraljević Jelena Kuvač, Westerveld Marleen F
Speech, Language and Hearing Disorders Postgraduate Doctoral Study Programme, Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia.
Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia.
Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch. 2025 Jul 16;56(3):617-632. doi: 10.1044/2025_LSHSS-24-00111. Epub 2025 May 5.
Although it is known that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulty composing personal narratives, previous studies have not employed a wide range of measures that reflect functioning at the different levels of discourse processing, as proposed in the Linguistic Underpinnings of Narrative in Aphasia (LUNA) framework. Because children evoke pleasant or unpleasant events through personal narratives, this study examines whether the emotional valence of the event influences the narrative production of Croatian-speaking children with DLD and those with typical language development (TLD) at the linguistic, propositional, and macrostructure levels.
Fifty 10-year-old Croatian-speaking children with DLD and 50 gender-matched peers with TLD told personal narratives elicited through emotion-based prompts using the Global TALES protocol. Emotional valence was analyzed by coding each narrative event as either pleasant (positive) or unpleasant (negative). The narratives were evaluated using measures from the linguistic (lexical diversity, grammatical complexity, and accuracy), propositional (mazes, incomplete utterances, local coherence) and macrostructure (global coherence) levels.
Our results show that children with DLD who speak Croatian have difficulty forming personal narratives at all three levels of discourse production, as evidenced by lower grammatical complexity and accuracy, more incomplete utterances, and lower local and global coherence. These difficulties are consistent in both positive and negative narratives. Results also showed that negative narratives are chronologically better ordered than positive narratives in both groups of children.
These findings provide further evidence that children with DLD have considerable difficulty producing linguistically well-organized, complete, and coherent personal narratives across different levels of the LUNA framework, regardless of the emotional valence of the events they recount.
尽管已知发育性语言障碍（DLD）儿童在撰写个人叙事方面存在困难，但以往研究并未采用如失语症叙事语言基础（LUNA）框架中所提出的、反映话语处理不同层次功能的广泛测量方法。由于儿童通过个人叙事唤起愉快或不愉快的事件，本研究考察事件的情感效价是否会在语言、命题和宏观结构层面影响说克罗地亚语的DLD儿童以及语言发育正常（TLD）儿童的叙事产出。
50名说克罗地亚语的10岁DLD儿童和50名性别匹配的TLD儿童，使用全球故事协议，通过基于情感的提示引出个人叙事。通过将每个叙事事件编码为愉快（积极）或不愉快（消极）来分析情感效价。使用来自语言（词汇多样性、语法复杂性和准确性）、命题（迷宫任务、不完整话语、局部连贯性）和宏观结构（全局连贯性）层面的测量方法对叙事进行评估。
我们的结果表明，说克罗地亚语的DLD儿童在话语产出的所有三个层面都难以形成个人叙事，语法复杂性和准确性较低、不完整话语更多以及局部和全局连贯性较低都证明了这一点。这些困难在积极和消极叙事中都是一致的。结果还表明，在两组儿童中，消极叙事在时间顺序上比积极叙事更有条理。
这些发现进一步证明，DLD儿童在LUNA框架的不同层面上产出语言组织良好、完整且连贯的个人叙事存在相当大的困难，无论他们所讲述事件的情感效价如何。
