Dia: 8 d'abril del 2024
Hora: 12:30 h
Lloc: aula 52.321 - 3a planta edifici 52. Roc Boronat - Campus del Poblenou - UPF, i també en línia. 

Resum:
In this presentation we will discuss whether a multimodal narrative intervention can boost the narrative abilities (i.e., macrostructure and perspective-taking) of NDD children and explore individual differences in NDD children’s narrative learning ability throughout the intervention.

To achieve our aim, 50 children aged 3 to 7 participated in this study. Using a between-subjects research design, we established 3 groups: an experimental group with NDD children (n = 16), an NDD control group (n = 17) and a typically developing (TD) control group (n = 17). Children in the experimental group received 1 weekly individualized MultiModal Narrative (MMN) intervention session for 10 weeks, while those in the control groups continued with their usual intervention sessions (either at speech-therapy or school level). Children’s oral narrative skills were evaluated pre- and post-intervention with a retelling task with trained and untrained stories. Also, after each intervention session, two dynamic assessment measures were administered to evaluate children’s learning ability by a) monitoring the ability to retell the trained story and b) using a hierarchy of prompts to correctly answer questions about the story elements.
Results revealed that children in the experimental group significantly improved in their ability to retell both trained and untrained stories from pre- to post-intervention and that at post-intervention they outperformed their NDD-matched peers not receiving the intervention, and that their scores were similar to their TD peers (Figure 1). No significant effects were observed for perspective-taking skills. Results from the two dynamic assessment measures revealed that a) there was a significant improvement in macrostructure skills between sessions 2 and 3 —an improvement which was maintained throughout the rest of the sessions—, while the significant improvement for perspective-taking skills was reached at session 6; and b) DLD children could answer the questions throughout the sessions without extra prompting more often than autistic children. Particularly, we observed that to give a correct answer, autistic children needed more support prompts (e.g., having pictures representing options to the question). Finally, we observed that the average of support prompts children needed to answer these questions throughout the sessions significantly predicted their narrative outcomes at post-test, suggesting that those who needed more support showed smaller improvements at post-test.
Our findings indicate that the MMN intervention can effectively boost children’s oral narrative skills, particularly macrostructure skills. These results also highlight the importance of using dynamic measures assessing learning ability, such as prompts, as they can be sensitive to individual differences between Autism and DLD.