Narrative as a tool for the assessment of linguistic and pragmatic impairments

Narrative ability is one of the most interesting and ecologically valid ways in which to measure communicative competence both in normal populations and in clinical groups, since narratives form the basis of many childhood speech acts. Narrative may also prove to be a good tool for distinguishing clinical groups who show overlapping symptoms but who are thought to experience subtly different impairments. This article gives an overview of some of the theoretical reasons for using narrative to assess both linguistic and pragmatic impairments. As part of a preliminary investigation examining possible similarities and differences across groups, five children with severe pragmatic language impairments (PLI) and five with more typical specific language impairments (SLI) completed short picture based narratives using the Bus Story and the Frog Story. These illustrative data are included throughout the paper to highlight features of use to clinicians, particularly with respect to differences in the narratives of children with PLI compared to their peers with SLI. Furthermore, when compared to Tager-Flusberg’s (1995) data from children with autism, SLI narratives seem to be more similar to those of the group with autism than did PLI narratives. Narrative ability was found to relate directly to pragmatic skill but in different ways according to clinical subgroup. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.