The Relationship between Story Recalling and Executive Functions of children with ADHD

Background & Objectives: The present study was designed to examine the narrative production abilities of children with ADHD. Methods: Total 40 children (aged 7; 1 to 14; 6) participated in this study: 10 ADHD children without language problem (ADHD only), 10 ADHD children with language impairment (ADHD-LD), 10 children with language impairment matched language age with ADHD language delay children, and 10 normal development children matched chronological age and language age with ADHD only children. The story "Frog, where are you"(Mayer, 1969) consisted of 5 episodes and 46 C-units was used. The rate of story recalling, the frequency of total story grammar, the rate of each elements of story grammar, and the rate of inappropriate C-unit were analysed. Results: (1) There were significant group differences in the rate of story recalling, the frequency of episode, and the rate of incorrect C-unit. In the rate of story recalling and the frequency of episode, ADHD-LD group produced significantly lower score than ND group. And in the inadequate C-unit, ADHD only, ADHD-LD, and LD groups produced significantly higher rate than ND group. (2) There was significant group difference in digit span test, it was caused the significant difference between ADHD-LD and ND groups. (3) There were positive correlations between the story production (rate of story recalling, the frequency of episode) and executive function (stroop and CCTT) and negative correlation between the rate of inadequate C-unit and digit span in ADHD only and ADHD-LD groups. Discussion & Conclusion: The abilities of story retelling of Children with ADHD could be affected whether they have languase problems or not and closely related with their working memory ability.