How do students with intellectual disabilities tell stories? An investigation of narrative macrostructure and microstructure.
Carmit Altman, Ilanit Avraham, Shlomit Shnitzer Meirovich and 1 others
PMID 35428038WHAT IT FOUND
Adults with intellectual disability told the picture story with a recognizable plot and characters' thoughts, like typical peers, but used simpler, less grammatical sentences and fewer adjectives.
Coherence and linking events were harder.
Key findings
01Typical students used more adjectives, while students with intellectual disability produced more simple sentences and fewer coordinated or subordinated sentences.
02The groups were similar on basic story elements such as setting, goals, attempts, and outcomes, and on most internal state terms.
03Students with intellectual disability scored lower on global coherence, local coherence, and informativeness, and used fewer enabling and motivational causal links.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small, with 17 students with intellectual disability, and came from a unique post-secondary Empowerment Project, so it may not represent adults with intellectual disability outside that setting. The groups were not age matched: the intellectual disability group averaged 41.65 years, while the typical development group averaged 24.87 years, so age and life experience may have influenced the comparisons. The study did not test any intervention, so it cannot show that storytelling improves with treatment or with picture support. Narratives were collected from a wordless picture book in Hebrew, and some grammatical errors involved Hebrew gender agreement, so the pattern may not generalize to other languages or to everyday conversation. Many outcome measures were not normally distributed, so non-parametric comparisons were used, and the small sample makes age correlations unstable.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adults with intellectual disability have age-appropriate narrative language overall, or that picture-book storytelling improves narrative skills. The groups were similar on basic story elements, but the intellectual disability group showed weaker sentence complexity, grammaticality, coherence, and causal linking, and no intervention was tested.