NARRATIVES AS A THERAPEUTIC APPROACH FOR CHILDREN WITH DEVELOPMENTAL LANGUAGE DISORDER

Abstract

Specific language impairments (terminologically replaced by Developmental Language Disorder) are a common communicative pathology that is associated with peculiarities in the development of cognitive and executive functions and has an impact on the formation of learning skills (especially over the acquisition of reading and writing). Speech therapy in early and preschool age aims to bring the level of development of children with specific language impairments closer to that of their peers and to allow timely entry in school. Over time, the specificity of the disorder gives way to more general and often hidden to non-specialists’ specifics of listening and/or reading and comprehension skills, telling and retelling stories. The persistent nature of specific language impairments is associated precisely with sustainable difficulties in narrative skills. Among the most widely applied therapeutic approaches in upper preschool and primary school age is the narrativebased intervention, aimed at solving both language and cognitive and executive tasks. The purpose of the study is to determine whether 6-year old children with specific language impairments experience difficulties in organizing the macro level of narrative (narrative structure, succession of episodes and causality), as well as to verify whether targeted speech and language therapy focused on conscious structuring of the macro-level will lead to an improvement of the micro-level aspects of the narrative (lexical selection, construction of adequate morphological and extended syntactic structures).