Narrative production weakness in Russian dyslexics: Linguistic or procedural limitations?

Abstract

The study deals with the impact of non-linguistic factors on narrative production in Russian-speaking dyslexic children. The experimental group consisted of 12 children (age 9–10) with dyslexia and the control group comprised 12 peers without any developmental disorders. The sample was counterbalanced from the perspective of narrative mode, story complexity, and task order. One of the classic methodologies for narrative analysis, i.e. story grammar, was extended in our study by a novel dynamic approach, enabling us to evaluate procedural features of narrative production. The results of our study highlight limitations in dyslexic narrative language underlined by two different causes. The first one can be defined as inefficiency in developing logical (temporal/causal) relationships between events; the other is difficulties in structuring an episode description. The high flexibility and dynamic changes in the episode structure in dyslexics anticipated the evidence that limitations in dyslexic narrative language are related to the deficit in procedural functions rather than to the primary language limitations; however, linguistic shortcomings in dyslexic narrative production still remain. Our experience with the dynamic approach to narrative assessment lends support to its value as a research tool. The novel dynamic approach to episode completeness analysis proved to be an effective and informative method that might highlight new mechanisms of narration and thus extend the classic narrative analysis by the addition of qualitative information.

Keywords

• first language acquisition
• language pathology
• Russian