Narrative comprehension and expression in Malayalam speaking children with cerebral palsy

Narratives is a form of discourse, which includes use of a series of sentences to describe an event. In the present study, narrative skills were investigated in 20 children with cerebral palsy (CP) and 20 typically developing (TD) children between 5 to 13 years. Both narrative comprehension and narrative expression (macro-structural and microstructural analysis) were explored. Narrative macro-structure analysis focused on scores obtained for story content, event, grammar and story. Narrative microstructure analysis included Type-Token Ratio (TTR), Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and Number of Sentences (NS). The study findings revealed a reduced performance in children with CP in all the measures with statistically significant difference for the tasks of narrative comprehension and TTR. The study indicates the relevance of using narrative analysis along with the standard test protocol for language assessment in children with CP.