(RE)CONTO: Tool to Assess Oral Narratives in European Portuguese-speaking Children

Abstract

Narrative competencies are determinant for the academic success of children and adolescents. The assessment of these competencies – including comprehension and production – is important to complement the diagnosis of children with language impairment, and to plan interventions in clinical and educational contexts. We present in this paper a tool to assess narrative competencies developed for children aged 6 to 12 speakers of European Portuguese. The tool comprises telling and retelling tasks, as well as comprehension questions (literal, inferential and critical comprehension). We report the results obtained by a sample of 521 children with typical development from eight regions of Portugal and by an exploratory group of 17 children with Developmental Language Disorder, considering the type of task, macrostructural and microstructural properties, group and age range. Additionally, we present some psychometric properties of the tool, which attest to its validity and reliability.