Narratives of Preterm and Full-Term Preschool-Aged Children: Analyses of Different Narrative Dimensions

Abstract

Preterm birth increases the likelihood of early language and cognitive delays, but less is known about later aspects of language development, such as narrative generation. Narrative skills involve dimensions, such as linguistic and narrative complexity, and preterm (PT) and full-term (FT) children's narrative performances may vary across these dimensions. We investigated the role of neonatal status on the total number of words produced, linguistic complexity, and narrative complexity across two presentation modes: narrative generation while seeing pictures and narrative generation after watching an animated video. Seventy-one Turkish-reared preschool-aged children (31 PT [Mage = 48.70, SD = 1.53] and 40 FT [Mage = 48.83, SD = 1.63]) participated in the study. Despite having lower expressive vocabulary skills (assessed by a standardized task) than full-term children, preterm children performed comparably in both picture and animated video-stories, except PT children tended to produce longer narratives in the picture story, possibly due to the different demand characteristics of the tasks. Overall, our findings support the possibility of interacting factors that may help PT children overcome challenges in narrative development.