The Role of Story Mode in the Narrative Skills of Children in Arabic Diglossia: Comparing Children with Typical Language Development and Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose: The study tested macro- and microstructure narrative skills in kinder­garten Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and in age-matched children with typical language development (TLD). Specifi­cally, it compared narrative skills in the two groups of children in two story modes: storytelling in Spoken Arabic (SpA) versus retelling of a story heard in Standard Arabic (StA). Method: Two LITMUS-MAIN stories (Language Impairment Testing in Multilin­gual Settings–Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives) matched on episodic structure were used: one for storytelling and another for story retelling. Eighteen children with DLD (M_age = 5.6 years) and 19 age-matched children with TLD (M_age = 5.7 years) were administered two tasks: a storytelling task in SpA and a retelling of a story heard in StA. Macrostructure was analyzed using set­ting and goal–attempt–outcome schema. Microstructure analysis addressed productivity, lexical diversity, and morphosyntactic accuracy. Results: Children with TLD demonstrated significantly higher scores compared to children with DLD on macrostructure and on most microstructure features, demonstrating higher productivity and fewer morphosyntactic errors in subject– verb gender agreement. The findings also revealed a significant effect of story mode; both groups demonstrated higher macrostructure skills and higher type– token ratio in the retelling mode yet higher linguistic productivity in the storytell­ing mode. Conclusions: The results support earlier reports of differences between children with TLD and those with DLD in narrative skills across story modes. Moreover, the results demonstrate the role of the story retelling mode in enhancing macro­structure generation and lexical diversity in both groups of children, even though narration in our case was conducted in StA, a variety less familiar to children. The implications of these findings for assessment and intervention are discussed.