Before an event
can be recalled, it must be encoded and stored in memory. We know from previous
research that the better new information is integrated with other information,
the better it is encoded and the easier it is to recall later on. It is thought
that in narratives, story events can be integrated by identifying temporal or
causal relationships between them, or by identifying characters’ motivations
(psychological causation). However, to speak about these relationships, the child
telling the story must be able to use a certain level of syntactic complexity.
Specifically, speaking about temporal or causal relationships often requires
the use of subordination. For example, in the sentences “We got lost twice
before we arrived at the hotel” and “Sheila tripped because Murray left the
rake on the lawn,” two events are joined by subordinating conjunctions, “before”
and “because.” In contrast, talking about characters’ motivations requires the
use of mental state terms, like “think” and “try,” or complement clauses. In
this context a complement is a phrase that completes the meaning of the verb,
acting like an object of the verb. In the sentence, “They knew she was
involved” the phrase “she was involved” is the complement of the verb “knew.” With
this in mind, Bishop and Donlan hypothesized that children with poor syntactic
ability would have difficulty recalling stories not necessarily because of poor
understanding of causal connections, but because of limited facility with these
syntactic structures.
Using two series
of five pictures each, the authors collected two narratives from three groups
of participants: typically developing children, children with expressive
specific language impairment (SLI-E) and children with receptive and expressive
SLI (SLI-R). Thirty minutes after the children generated the initial
narratives, they were asked to recall both of them. Both initial and recalled
narratives were coded for content, whereas initial narratives were coded further
for syntax (mean length of utterance and coding for clause type) and inclusion
of mental state terms. All children completed measures of nonverbal reasoning
and vocabulary, and children with SLI completed additional assessments of language
ability and general comprehension.
Analysis of the
initial narratives showed that both SLI groups produced shorter and grammatically
simpler stories than the control group, however only the SLI-R group used
simpler clause structure and fewer mental state terms than controls. Examination
of the recalled narratives in light of the initial narrative showed that the
SLI-R group forgot disproportionately more of the story content than did the
other two groups. Correlational analyses found that positive predictors of
content in recalled narratives included complement clauses, subordinate
clauses, mental state terms, and general comprehension. No correlation was
found for nonverbal reasoning or vocabulary. The authors use these results to
support the hypothesis that structural language ability to a greater extent
than nonverbal reasoning contributes to encoding and therefore recall of
narratives.
Blogger: Laura Pauls is a PhD student in
Speech & Language Science, researching children with language impairment
and/or working memory impairment.
