DOI: 10.1044/2026_jslhr-25-00434 ISSN: 1092-4388

Characterizing Features of Vulnerability in Narrative Production of Cantonese-Speaking School-Aged Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Jane Lai, Angel Chan, Sonia Hui, Man Tung Lee, Nga Yi Kong, Sabrina Wong, Sze Wing Wong, Natalia Gagarina
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Purpose:

Narratives show vulnerability in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) cross-linguistically. However, certain narrative measures revealing significant deficits in English and European DLD literature have been studied primarily in preschoolers, with limited evidence in school-aged children and no data in Cantonese. We examine features of vulnerability in narrative production of school-aged children learning a major Chinese language, Cantonese.

Method:

Twenty-five children with DLD ( M age = 9;7 [years;months]) and age-matched typically developing (TD) peers ( M age = 9;8) were assessed using the Cantonese Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) in story retelling and storytelling. Their narrative competence across macrostructure, microstructure, and internal state term measures were analyzed at group and individual diagnostic accuracy levels.

Results:

Both expressive macrostructure and microstructure showed significant TD/DLD group differences, indicating story structure (SS), story complexity (SC), syntactic complexity, and grammaticality are vulnerable in monolingual Cantonese-speaking school-aged children with DLD. No significant TD/DLD group differences were registered in number of different words, mean length of utterance, productivity measures (total number of utterances, total number of words), or internal state terms. For diagnostic accuracies, SS and syntactic complexity reached acceptable sensitivity (91.7% and 83.3%, respectively) but limited specificity (41.7% and 70.8%, respectively); SC and grammaticality showed marginal sensitivity and specificity (both 70.8%).

Conclusions:

This study confirms SS, SC, grammaticality, and syntactic complexity—but not productivity—as features of vulnerability in narrative production of Cantonese-speaking school-aged children with DLD. The exploratory diagnostic accuracy results support using narrative measures in combination with other assessments for diagnosis. Future studies should examine younger and larger samples to further document these vulnerability features and evaluate the clinical utility of narrative measures at earlier developmental stages.

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