Investigating the Narrative Skills of Late Talkers Through Sequential Picture Stories

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the oral narrative skills of late talkers mostly caused by mental disorders while they try to comprehend a wordless sequential picture story to create and narrate the relevant story. To this end, 15 (10 male and 5 female) participants were who were the students of a specialized school for physically and mentally retarded students selected based on the purposive sampling. They were the students of grade one with the age ranging between 6 to 13 years old. All of them had language delay which was caused by mental disorder. Their narrations were observed and recorded in a semi natural setting by the researchers canducted and their speech therapist (ST). Based on the data collected from the interview by the researcher, it was concluded that most of the students were not able to keep the sequence while narrating the picture story. With regard to syntactic patterns, all of the sentences were holophrastic or two-word utterances bearing a simple structure although some exceptions were identified. An element which was mostly seen in late talkers was their inability to name the objects because of their restricted lexicon therefore they compensated trying to define the function of the word they tried to utter.