Personal narratives of children with DLD (Gabaj et al., 2025)

Purpose: 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.

Method: 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusion: 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.

Supplemental Material S1. Four examples of coded transcripts of personal narratives that show both positive and negative events.

Gabaj, M., Kuvač Kraljević, J., & Westerveld, M. F. (2025). The personal narratives of Croatian-speaking children with developmental language disorder: Investigating the influence of emotional valence at linguistic, propositional, and macrostructure levels. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-24-00111