NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT IN LATE TALKERS - EARLY SCHOOL-AGE

Children with slow expressive language development (SELD) as toddlers and a control group of children with normal language development (NL) were followed to early school age. Children with SELD were, at that po int, subdivided into two groups: those who had moved within the normal range of expressive language (the History of Expressive Language Dela y [HELD] subgroup); and those who continued to score below the normal range in expressive language at school age (the Expressive Language De lay [ELD] subgroup). During their kindergarten, first, and second grad e years, they were administered a narrative generation task. Narrative s were analyzed for MLU, lexical diversity, amount of information incl uded, proportion of complete cohesive ties, and overall stage of narra tive maturity. In kindergarten, children with normal language history sco-ed significantly higher than those with HELD and ELD on lexical di versity and narrative stage; and higher than those with ELD in proport ion of complete cohesive ties. In first grade, children with normal la nguage history again scored significantly higher than those with HELD and ELD on narrative maturity, with no other significant differences. In second grade, there were no significant differences among the group s.