Controlling the narrative: the relationship between narrative ability and executive functioning in children with developmental language disorder

Abstract

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience problems in language comprehension and/or production. In particular, storytelling or narrative ability is often impaired, as this type of discourse involves all domains of language. These problems may lead to a lower quality of social interaction and mental health. Moreover, problems in oral narrative ability during early development have a negative effect on later literacy. However, telling a story involves more than language alone. Executive functioning is thought to play an important part in stimulating narrative ability, as linguistic utterances need to be planned in a temporal and causal order, and switching is needed between multiple characters and events in the story. Research has shown that children with DLD experience problems with executive functioning, independent of their language ability. Thus, the difficulties in storytelling may be caused by both impaired language and executive functioning, as both domains follow hierarchical developmental paths during the early childhood years. In this review, we discuss three components of narrative ability (comprehension, production of macrostructure and production of microstructure) and how they may be interconnected to the three core components of executive functioning (working memory, switching and inhibition) and attention. This review shows that updating and monitoring information in working memory plays an important part in all three components of narrative ability, across multiple studies. This result may give direction in the development of narrative assessment and intervention, and urge further research to disentangle the interplay between language and executive control in DLD.

Keywords: children; developmental language disorder; executive functioning; narrative ability; neuropsychology.