Sharing stories versus explaining facts: Comparing African American children’s microstructure performance across fictional narrative, informational, and procedural discourse

Gardner-Neblett, N., & Alvarez, D. L. (2024). Sharing stories versus explaining facts: Comparing African American children’s microstructure performance across fictional narrative, informational, and procedural discourse. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(11), 4431–4445. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00579

Discourse refers to the ability to put spoken (or written) utterances / statements together in communicative tasks. Fictional stories (or narratives) are one type of discourse. Young children often hear and are encouraged to tell stories. Other types of discourse involve explanations or descriptions. For example, information discourse refers to telling factual information about something (e.g., dinosaurs) and procedural discourse is when the steps of a task are described. A key feature of effective discourse is microstructure, or the sentence level grammatical features. Microstructure can be measured in terms of how many words or different words are produced (i.e., productivity) or the grammatical structure of sentences (i.e., complex sentence structures).

In this study, 130 African American kindergarten through second-grade students were shown wordless picture books to elicit three types of spoken discourse: narrative, procedural, informational. The findings showed that children produced longer and more diverse language in fictional narratives compared to informational and procedural discourse. Fictional narratives and procedural discourse also demonstrated more complex sentence structures than informational discourse. Additionally, older children generally outperformed younger ones in productivity and complexity, particularly in fictional and informational discourse.

The findings suggests that educators and speech-language pathologists should consider different discourse types when assessing and supporting children’s language development. Expository discourse is often used in teaching, so children may benefit from targeted strategies to develop their expository language skills.

Blogger: Diya Nair is a first year PhD student under the supervision of Dr Lisa Archibald