Assessing the development of narrative comprehension and production in preschool children

Abstract

This study aimed to develop a narrative production and comprehension assessment task for Cantonese-speaking preschool children. Children participated in the study by retelling a story, answering factual and inferential questions. In production task, syntactic complexity, conjunction, referencing and macrostructure were measured. In comprehension task, factual and inferential questions were included. The result revealed that the narrative task was generally developmentally sensitive. Syntactic complexity measure was the best measure in capturing developmental changes while conjunction measure was the least developmental sensitive. Significant developmental differences in comprehension task were found for the K1 group and the K2 group, the K1 and the K3 group but not between K2 and K3 group. Strong positive correlation between comprehension and production performance was also indicated.