Development of cohesive measures in Cantonese preschoolers' narratives

Abstract

Aim: This study aimed to examine the clinical usefulness of four cohesive measures in describing Cantonese-speaking preschool children’s narrative ability. Method: A total of 90 typically-developing Cantonese–speaking children aged from 3;00 to 6;00 were recruited. Fictional narratives were elicited through story retelling. The measures under investigation included (1) mean length of utterance (MLU), (2) connectives, (3) modifiers and (4) referencing. Results: All the four measures demonstrated satisfactory to good scoring reliability with MLU showing the lowest agreement. Each measure demonstrated statistically significant growth across age groups but with different rate of development. The measure of referencing was found to be the most developmentally sensitive and followed by modifiers. Conclusions: The feasibilities of using each measure to describe preschool children’s language in clinical practice were discussed. This study may pave the way to the development of a largerscale standardized assessment tools in the future.