The Use of the ENNI to Assess Story Grammar Competency of School-Aged French Speaking Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment

Narratives provide a rich source of linguistic data for the study of language production at the discourse level. In Canada, the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI) provides speech-language pathologists with a tool for quantifying the narrative skills of English-speaking children with respect to their production of Story Grammar elements (i.e.: characters, setting, etc.) and First Mentions (i.e.: referential expressions). This study presents findings on the potential of the ENNI to measure the changes in Story Grammar scores of French-speaking children of ages seven and nine and its potential to differentiate French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) from their typically-developing peers (TD). Twelve nine-year-old children with SLI, 12 typically-developing children matched on language abilities (LA), and 12 typically-developing children matched on chronological age were included in this study. Results indicate that the set of pictures designed for English-speaking children can be used for Story Grammar elicitation with French-speaking children of Quebec. However, the findings presented in this study raise the question of potential cultural bias and emphasize the need for a normalization study with the French-speaking population of Quebec.