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Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR logoLink to Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR
. 2021 Aug 4;64(9):3489–3503. doi: 10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00403

The Contribution of Vocabulary, Grammar, and Phonological Awareness Across a Continuum of Narrative Ability Levels in Young Children

Kiren S Khan a,✉, Jessica Logan b, Laura M Justice a,b, Ryan P Bowles c, Shayne B Piasta a,d
PMCID: PMC9128800  PMID: 34351810

Abstract

Purpose

Narrative skill represents a higher-level linguistic skill that shows incremental development in the preschool years. During these years, there are considerable individual differences in this skill, with some children being highly skilled narrators (i.e., precocious) relative to peers of their age. In this study, we explored the contribution of three lower-level language skills to a range of narrative abilities, from children performing below expected levels for their age to those performing much higher than the expected levels for their age. We speculated that individual differences in lower-level skills would contribute meaningfully to variability in narrative skills.

Method

Using a sample of 336 children between 3 and 6 years of age (M = 4.27 years, SD = 0.65), both multiple regression and quantile regression approaches were used to explore how vocabulary, grammar, and phonological awareness account for variance in children's “narrative ability index” (NAI), an index of how children scored on the Narrative Assessment Protocol–Second Edition relative to the expected performance for their age.

Results

Multiple regression results indicated that lower-level language skills explained a significant amount of variance (approximately 13%) in children's NAI scores. Quantile regression results indicated that phonological awareness and vocabulary accounted for significant variance in children's NAI scores at lower quantiles. At the median quantile, vocabulary and grammar accounted for significant variance in children's NAI scores. For precocious narrators, only vocabulary accounted for a significant amount of variance in children's NAI scores.

Conclusion

Results indicate that lower-level language skills work in conjunction to support narrative skills at different ability levels, improving understanding of how lower-level language skills contribute across a spectrum of higher-level linguistic abilities.

It is a well-observed phenomenon that some individuals are better storytellers (i.e., narrators) than others. Telling a coherent narrative, whether it be the construction of a fictional story or the relating of a personal account, is a complex, higher-level task that draws upon multiple linguistic and cognitive skills. Efforts to understand why some children are better narrators than others have suggested that good narrators compared to less skilled narrators tend to have larger vocabularies (e.g., Uccelli & Páez, 2007), better syntactic abilities (e.g., Berman & Slobin, 1994), more sophisticated metalinguistic abilities (Curenton & Justice, 2004; Hipfner-Boucher et al., 2014), and greater cognitive capacities such as working memory resources (e.g., Montgomery et al., 2008) and executive function capacities (e.g., Friend & Bates, 2014).

One framework for understanding the development of narrative abilities across early childhood, as well as individual differences in this skill, involves viewing language and cognitive skills as developmental constraints that limit the complexity and coherence of children's productions. Specifically, according to an emergentist perspective (see Marchman, 1997), qualitative shifts in language processing and abilities can be seen as an emergent property of continuous language learning. As one example, using connectionist models to simulate language acquisition, researchers have shown that more complex language structures, such as productive morphology, emerge dynamically as a result of an incremental increase in lexical units (Plunkett & Marchman, 1993). In the case of narrative development, incremental increases in component language skills, such as vocabulary and grammar, may similarly result in qualitative shifts in higher-level language skills, such as children's abilities to construct stories. Moreover, distinct combinations of component language skills may differentially contribute to narrative skills across a spectrum of narrative ability levels, from children performing below expected levels for their age to children who are performing at advanced levels compared to peers of their age.

This study's focus on understanding the contributions of lower-level language skills to narrative skills is aligned with recent work exploring the integrative relations between lower-level and higher-level language skills (e.g., Foorman et al., 2015; Language and Reading Research Consortium [LARRC], 2015a, 2015b) in young children. Theoretically, this work views language ability to be multidimensional and builds upon earlier work highlighting the importance of higher-level language skills to skilled reading comprehension (e.g., Cain et al., 2004). According to Cain et al. (2004), higher-level language skills are those that involve integration across sentences or ideas, such as narrative skill or discourse-level skills; such skills are correlated with lower-level skills that are associated with relatively lower cognitive processing demands, such as vocabulary and grammar, but are conceptually distinct. Supporting this claim, LARRC (2015a) found that discourse (a latent variable representing narrative and other higher-level skills) is conceptually distinct from lower-level skills in a study of the dimensionality of language skill for first- through third-grade children. Additionally and in accordance with a long-range view of reading, extending earlier to the preschool period and through the elementary school years, some researchers emphasize the importance of lower-level language skills as primary predictors of later reading and listening comprehension skills (e.g., Hulme & Snowling, 2011). Indeed, there is evidence from retrospective studies showing poor comprehenders having weaknesses in vocabulary that are present in the preschool years (e.g., Catts et al., 2006; Justice et al., 2013). However, less is known about the associations between lower-level language and narrative skills in the preschool period. As narrative skill is theorized to function as a bridge between oral language and early reading (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005; Snow, 1991), we might expect similar contributions of lower-level language to narrative and reading skills in young children.

The focus of this study on examining three lower-level language skills of vocabulary (semantic), grammar (syntactic), and phonological awareness (phonological) as contributors to narrative abilities (a higher-level language skill) is also consistent with prior work that considers narrative to be a rich and broad representation of children's general language abilities (e.g., Boudreau & Hedberg, 1999; Culatta et al., 1983; Pankratz et al., 2007; Tilstra & McMaster, 2007). Indeed, much of the work examining narrative skills in young children compares these abilities in children with language impairments (LIs) and typically developing peers (Liles et al., 1995; Peña et al., 2006) and has found significant differences in the quality and complexity of narrations across these two groups. These findings suggest that language abilities are positively correlated with narrative abilities; however, no prior study has examined the relative contributions of distinct lower-level language skills to children's narrative skills across a continuum of narrative ability levels. Evidence from the reading comprehension literature suggests that different language skills contribute across the continuum of reading comprehension proficiency levels (LARRC & Logan, 2017; Tighe & Schatschneider, 2016), suggesting distinct “pressure points” (LARRC & Logan, 2017; Perfetti et al., 2014) that result in reading comprehension success and failure. Adopting a similar reasoning, understanding how the predictive contribution of lower-level language skills varies as a function of the level of narrative abilities can (a) help clarify mechanistic accounts regarding the extent to which lower-level language skills contribute to different narrative ability levels and (b) help in identifying potential constraints and malleable linguistic targets to further bolster narrative skills at different ability levels.

Oral Language and Narrative Skills

The Association Between Vocabulary, Grammar, and Narrative Skills

The association between language competencies and narrative skills is readily apparent when one considers that telling a meaningful story necessarily draws upon linguistic knowledge and skills, including lexical and semantic, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic knowledge (Botting, 2002; Vandewalle et al., 2012). For instance, having a broad and varied vocabulary supports the production of narratives with high levels of clarity and appropriate references to characters and events (Uccelli & Páez, 2007). Likewise, with increasingly sophisticated levels of grammar, children are better able to construct sentences that employ appropriate connective devices and are organized in a clear manner (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Eisenberg et al., 2008; Hickmann, 2004). In fact, some researchers, including de Villiers and de Villiers (2000), argue that children's ability to understand causal and temporal links among story events may only emerge once they master the use of certain syntactic constructions, such as subordinate clauses, that help encode these relational aspects. In general, research investigating the importance of language skills in supporting narrative abilities across childhood shows that as language competence increases, so does the overall quality and organization of children's oral narratives (e.g., Fiorentino & Howe, 2004; Sénéchal et al., 2008).

The predominant approach to understanding the association between language and spoken narratives in the extant literature has been to compare the storytelling abilities of children with LI to their peers. A consistent finding across these studies is that children who exhibit difficulties with language also perform poorly on narrative retelling tasks (see Boudreau, 2008, for a review). Specifically, studies with school-age children show that children with LI compared to their typically developing peers tend to produce narratives with less lexical diversity (e.g., Fey et al., 2004), fewer complex clauses (Bishop & Donlan, 2005; Liles et al., 1995; Manhardt & Rescorla, 2002), and less grammatical accuracy (Norbury & Bishop, 2003; Scott & Windsor, 2000). Findings from studies of younger children similarly show that children with LI are more likely than their typically developing peers to tell narratives of poorer quality in terms of the structure and syntactic complexity of the narratives (e.g., Kaderavek & Sulzby, 2000; Vandewalle et al., 2012) as well as in terms of references to cognitive states (Cleave et al., 2010).

The Association Between Phonological Awareness and Narrative Skills

From a cognitive developmental perspective, the association between narrative skills and phonological awareness can be explained by considering how growth in each of these areas relies upon and further hones metalinguistic awareness. According to Bialystok (1993, 1999), representational analysis and cognitive control mechanisms work together to support language, with representational analysis referring to the ability to represent the underlying structure of language and cognitive control referring to the ability to selectively attend to relevant aspects of the structure of language. Extending this framework to children's developing narrative abilities, storytelling, which requires attention to story structure—both in terms of individual story grammar units, such as setting, characters, conflict, and resolution (Stein & Glenn, 1979), and the causal and temporal connections between them—may reflect children's developing awareness of discourse-level language structure. Similarly, phonological awareness may be viewed as reflecting children's abilities to selectively attend to the sound structure of language. Thus, an underlying mechanism that may support growth across language and literacy domains is an emerging metalinguistic ability to attend to the structure of language, whether at the discourse level as in the case of narrative, at the lexical level as in word identification tasks, or at the sublexical level as implicated in phonological awareness.

Indeed, there is some empirical evidence that language awareness at the lexical level (e.g., words) may exert a significant influence on language awareness at the sublexical level (e.g., phonemes). A well-documented phenomenon wherein children's expanding vocabulary promotes phonological awareness (i.e., the isolation and manipulation of the sound structure of language) led to the formulation of the lexical restructuring hypothesis (Bowey, 2001; Goswami, 2001; Walley, 1993). According to this model, phonological representations become more fully specified to avoid confusion with similar-sounding lexical items as an individual increases their repertoire of words. Similar observations have been made regarding the influence of grammatical complexity (Dale et al., 1995; Farrar et al., 2005) and narrative structure (Hipfner-Boucher et al., 2014) on phonological awareness in young children. Moreover, given the reciprocal relationship observed between vocabulary and phonological awareness—wherein vocabulary growth promotes phonological awareness, which, in turn, facilitates further vocabulary development—we might expect a similar reciprocal relationship would hold for phonological awareness and narrative abilities. While we do not test the directionality of the effect in this study given its correlational design, a strong association between phonological awareness and narrative retelling skills may indicate common developing mechanisms.

Continuum of Language Abilities and Narrative Skill Development

Few studies have examined how individual differences in the emergence of language abilities are associated with narrative skill development. Among these, the findings are mixed, with some studies showing that children with language delays as toddlers produced narratives in the early elementary school years that were less linguistically complex and contained fewer structural elements compared to their typically developing peers (Manhardt & Rescorla, 2002; Miniscalco et al., 2007; Paul & Smith, 1993). Other studies, however, have not found differences in the narratives produced by children with a history of language delay versus typically developing children (e.g., Domsch et al., 2012; Paul et al., 1996).

Very few studies have examined the narrative skills of children exhibiting linguistic precocity (i.e., advanced language abilities relative to one's age-matched peers) or attempted to explain their verbal abilities in terms of individual differences in lower-level language skill profiles. The limited literature on this topic suggests that linguistic precocity is a stable trait in early childhood (Crain-Thoreson & Dale, 1992) and that lower-level language skills are more strongly predictive of the emergence of more complex language forms than chronological age. For instance, there is evidence that emerging grammatical morphology may be related to vocabulary size (McGregor et al., 2005; Thordardottir et al., 2002), such that verb inflections only emerge as children reach a certain threshold in terms of vocabulary size. As some children may reach this threshold sooner than others, the growth and size of the lexicon appears to be a more powerful determiner of grammatical growth than chronological age (see Thal et al., 1996). Based on this pattern of precocity in vocabulary prompting accelerated growth in grammatical abilities, it can be hypothesized that narrative abilities may also undergo a boost from rapid growth in vocabulary, grammar, and phonological awareness. In other words, narrative ability may not be as tightly bound to age and may instead rely on a combination of lower-level language skills.

The narrative abilities of linguistically precocious children have received very little attention in the literature, however. In one study, Davidson and Snow (1995) observed that kindergarteners who were precocious readers significantly outperformed their peers at providing procedural descriptions for an activity; specifically, their narratives were organized in a more orderly manner and contained more information that helped orient the listener to the activity. In a separate study, Jen et al. (2015) found that kindergarteners who were identified as being verbally talented (i.e., possessing a rich vocabulary and having clear and fluent oral expression) told stories that included more clauses and contained a greater number of different words (NDW), modifiers, and complex conjunctions. Thus, there is some evidence for children with advanced language and reading profiles also producing more linguistically sophisticated and coherent narratives compared to their peers; however, it is unclear how individual lower-level language skills contribute uniquely and jointly to the narrative skills of children who are precocious storytellers compared to children performing at or below expected levels for their age.

This Study

The primary aim of this study is to examine the associations among children's lower-level language skills and higher-level narrative abilities during the preschool and kindergarten period when language and metalinguistic knowledge is developing at a rapid pace. In order to examine whether these associations vary across a continuum of narrative ability levels, we utilize a novel approach by creating a narrative ability index (NAI) instead of arbitrarily grouping children into “good” and “poor” narrators for their age. This study addresses the following research questions: (a) What are the contributions of vocabulary, grammar, and phonological awareness to 3- to 6-year-old children's scores on the NAI? (b) Do associations among lower-level language skills and narrative vary at different points in the continuum of narrative abilities, that is, in children who are developmentally precocious or exceptional storytellers for their age compared to those who are average or below average in their storytelling abilities?

Method

Participants

Children (n = 336) between 3 and 5.5 years of age (M = 4.27 years, SD = 0.65) participated in a study designed to further develop a narrative assessment tool, namely, the Narrative Assessment Protocol–Second Edition (NAP-2; Bowles et al., 2020). Recruitment was conducted by distributing flyers and caregiver consent materials at child care, school, and community (e.g., public library) sites across two different states (Michigan and Ohio). All children whose caregivers returned signed consent forms and met eligibility criteria (i.e., proficient in speaking and understanding English, free of significant language or developmental disabilities) were enrolled in the study. Twenty-nine children did not complete the NAP-2 assessment and were therefore excluded from analyses (final n = 307).

Fifty-four percent of children in this study were male. The majority were White/Caucasian (60%); 18% were Black/African American, 4% were Asian, and 15% were multiracial. Eight percent were Hispanic or Latino. Primary caregivers' highest degree earned included a high school diploma (34%), an associate's degree (5%), a bachelors' degree (22%), a master's degree (21%), or a doctoral degree (9%). Thirty-five percent of children's caregivers reported annual household incomes of less than $25,000, 20% reported incomes of $25,000–$75,000, and 33% reported incomes of greater than $75,000. The majority of the sample lived in urban (37%) or suburban (50%) areas, although some children lived in rural areas (6%).

Procedure and Measures

Children were assessed individually by trained research assistants in a quiet location at their respective child care or school or at an alternative site based on caregiver preference. Each child completed an assessment battery that included multiple language and literacy measures. The assessment battery was typically conducted in a single session of about 40–45 min, but if needed, an additional session was conducted within 1–2 weeks of the first session. Parents were compensated with gift cards and children's books for their children's participation in the study.

Narrative Skill

Children's narrative skills were measured using the NAP-2 (Bowles et al., 2020), which is the result of a psychometrically rigorous redevelopment of the original Narrative Assessment Protocol. Similar to other narrative measures (e.g., Test of Narrative Language [Gillam & Pearson, 2004] and Renfrew Bus Story [Glasgow & Cowley, 1994]), the NAP-2 both elicits and scores aspects of children's narratives via a story retelling paradigm. Unlike the original version, the NAP-2 scores aspects of both narrative macrostructure (e.g., identification of main character and identification of subgoals, problems, and resolutions) and narrative microstructure (e.g., use of conjoined adverbial phrases, gratuitous terms, Tier 2 vocabulary, and elaborated noun phrases). These items were identified via an exhaustive literature search on children's narrative development and then subjected to a series of validation procedures, including factor analysis and Rasch analysis (Bowles et al., 2020). The 20 items in the final version of the NAP-2 thus reflect the desired psychometric characteristics of capturing and differentiating the entire range of narrative abilities, from below average to average to high narrative abilities in children between 3 and 6 years of age. Importantly, these items represent a variety of narrative features such as macro- and microstructural aspects, storytelling conventions (title, conventional opening and ending, and references to time), and evaluative aspects (elongations, similes and metaphors, and emotional state references). Seventeen out of the 20 items are scored on frequency of occurrence, with a range of 0–3+, such that more than three occurrences are considered ceiling, while the remaining three items (conventional opening and ending, title) are scored on a 0–1 scale. Thus, possible scores on this measure range from 0 to 54 points (see Appendix A in Bowles et al., 2020, for the NAP-2 scoring sheet). The NAP-2 materials and training are available at www.narrativeassessment.com.

Each child was randomly assigned one of four possible wordless picture books developed for the NAP-2 and equated on difficulty. Each picture book consisted of 16 pages and was accompanied by a script that ranged between 364 and 375 words. To administer the NAP-2, experimenters followed the NAP-2 administration instructions (available on the NAP-2 website). First, they read the scripted story to the child and then asked them to retell the story with the aid of the wordless picture book. If the child hesitated during the storytelling, the following prompts were provided: “What about this page?” and “You can use the pictures to help.” Children's retellings were audio-recorded and coded by two trained research assistants who underwent a rigorous training procedure. Specifically, they first watched two videos with accompanying master-coded transcripts to familiarize themselves with the scoring process. Next, they practiced scoring five videos, comparing their scores to the master codes. Finally, research assistants scored three videos and were required to reach 85% exact agreement with the master codes to achieve coding reliability; those who were unable to reach the criterion could repeat with a new set of three videos, up to a total of 4 times. All research assistants were able to achieve coding reliability within this approach. The reliability of the NAP-2 measure was .81 as computed via Rasch analysis using Winsteps (Linacre, 2021). For this study, 10% of the data (34 narratives) were double-coded to determine interrater agreement. Exact agreement calculated at the item level between coders was .85 [.83, .87]. Raw scores were used in analyses.

Vocabulary and Grammar Skills

Children's oral language skills, including semantic and grammatical knowledge, were assessed via two subtests of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool–Second Edition (CELF Preschool-2; Wiig et al., 2004): Expressive Vocabulary and Sentence Structure. The Expressive Vocabulary subtest evaluates children's abilities to label illustrations of people, objects, and actions. The Sentence Structure subtest measures children's abilities to understand sentences of increasing length and syntactic complexity. Internal consistencies for the subtests range from .82 to .83 (Wiig et al., 2004). Raw scores for each subtest were used in analyses.

Phonological Awareness

Children's phonological awareness skills were measured via the Phonological Awareness subtest of the CELF Preschool-2 (Wiig et al., 2004). The subtest requires children to identify and produce rhymes, combine words and syllables, and segment sentences and syllables. Internal consistency ranges from .88 to .89 for children ages 4–5 years (Wiig et al., 2004). Raw scores were used in analyses.

Analytical Approach

Creation of NAI

The primary aim of this study was to explore the differential associations among lower-level language skills and narrative skills in children performing at, below, or above expected levels for their age. We therefore needed to create an index that would place children's narrative skills on a continuum of proficiency relative to their age. To do so, we first regressed age on children's z-scored NAP-2 scores (see results in Figure 1). Age explained 10% of variance in the total NAP-2 scores for the sample (R 2 = .106), F(1, 305) = 36.01, p < .001. We next calculated each child's residual term (or the difference between their observed score and the score we would expect based on their age). Children with a large positive residual are those who have higher NAP-2 scores than we would expect based on their age given this sample. In other words, we consider children with a strong positive residual are more precocious than children with lower or negative scores. The range of values on the NAI was from −2.01 (indicating 2 SDs below the expected score for their age) to 3.91 (almost 4 SDs above the expected score based on age). We call this residual the NAI and used this as the outcome in all subsequent analyses.

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

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Regression of children's Narrative Assessment Protocol–Second Edition (NAP-2) scores on age. Data points above the regression line represent precocious narrators, while data points below the regression line represent children who are underperforming on the NAP-2 relative to expected levels for their age.

Next, we conducted a multiple regression to examine how all the predictor variables together explained variance in children's NAI scores. In order to control for the effects of possible third variables, we included household income (a proxy for socioeconomic status) as a covariate in the multiple regression analyses. Household income was determined via responses to a background questionnaire distributed to families with the consent forms, which asked the children's primary caregivers to indicate whether their annual household income was less than $25,000, between $25,000 and $75,000, or greater than $75,000.

Quantile Regression Probes at Different Points in the NAI Spectrum

Another major aim of this study was to examine the association between lower-level language skills and narrative skills at specific points in the distribution, namely, children who were highly precocious, children performing at expected levels for their age, and children who were underperforming relative to their age. A typical approach would be to create groups, but this violates some of the rules of parametric statistics, such as truncating the range of the outcome variable and resulting in parameter bias due to sample selection effects. An alternate approach is to use quantile regression, which has the benefit of using the entire distribution to probe associations at multiple points in the distribution. Each observation is weighted differentially depending on its proximity to the quantile being estimated, with points that are closer getting a stronger weight and those farther away being assigned a weaker weight. Due to this weighted method of estimation, quantile regression has added benefits of no assumptions regarding the variance in the residual error terms, no assumptions on the functional form of the relation, and being robust to outliers and nonnormally distributed data (Koenker, 2005). In order to address our research question regarding the associations between language and narrative skills at different narrative ability levels, we probed associations at the 20th, 50th, and 80th percentiles, which we consider as points representing below average, average, and high precocious narrative abilities.

Results

Associations Among Lower-Level Language Skills and Narrative

Descriptives and Correlations

Descriptive statistics on all measures, including means, standard deviations, and ranges, are included in Table 1. Eleven percent of children scored 0 on the NAP-2, and the distribution of scores on this measure did not substantially differ from normality (skewness = .306, kurtosis = .076). Floor effects were similarly not an issue on the subtests of the CELF Preschool-2, with 0.5%, 0.3%, and 6% of children scoring a 0 on the Vocabulary, Grammar, and Phonological Awareness subtests, respectively. As is evident from the descriptive data, a wide range of narrative skills were observed in the study sample. In order to examine how each of the three measures was associated with children's narrative skills, bivariate correlations were calculated between the raw scores on each of the four measures with age regressed out of them. Table 2 displays the Pearson correlation coefficients between each pair of measures. As can be seen in this table, small to moderate correlations were observed between language and narrative measures (r = .23 to r = .34). Correlations among vocabulary, grammar, and phonological awareness were moderate, ranging from r = .40 to r = .50.

Table 1.

Descriptive statistics for narrative, phonological awareness, and language measures.

Domain Measure M SD Min Max
1. Narrative NAP-2 (raw scores) 10.23 6.73 0 37
NAP-2 (scaled scores) 18.86 2.15 14.18 23.31
2. Phonological awareness CELF-PA 10.65 6.93 0 24
3. Grammar CELF-SS 13.73 4.62 0 22
4. Vocabulary CELF-EV 20.68 7.75 0 39
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Note. NAP-2 = Narrative Assessment Protocol–Second Edition (Bowles et al., 2020); CELF-PA = Phonological Awareness subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool–Second Edition (Wiig et al., 2004); CELF-SS = Sentence Structure subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool–Second Edition (Wiig et al., 2004); CELF-EV = Expressive Vocabulary subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool–Second Edition (Wiig et al., 2004).

Table 2.

Correlation matrix for narrative, phonological awareness, and language measures.

Domain Measure 1 2 3 4
1. Narrative ability index NAP-2 —
2. Phonological awareness CELF-PA .23** —
3. Grammar CELF-SS .23** .43** —
4. Vocabulary CELF-EV .34** .40** .50** —
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Note. NAP-2 = Narrative Assessment Protocol–Second Edition (Bowles et al., 2020); CELF-PA = Phonological Awareness subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool–Second Edition (Wiig et al., 2004); CELF-SS = Sentence Structure subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool–Second Edition (Wiig et al., 2004); CELF-EV = Expressive Vocabulary subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool–Second Edition (Wiig et al., 2004).

**

p < .01.

In order to examine the unique contribution of vocabulary, grammar, and phonological awareness to the NAI scores, we conducted a multiple regression (see Table 3 for multiple regression results). When all of the lower-level language measures were included in the regression model, only expressive vocabulary significantly accounted for variance in the NAI scores, b = 0.26, t(298) = 4.07, p < .001. The next largest effect size, for phonological awareness, was half as big and not statistically significant. The total variance explained in the NAI using the lower-level language skills was 12.6%. These associations held even after adding household income as a covariate to the model, which only accounted for 0.4% of unique variance in NAI scores.

Table 3.

Results of linear regression on children's narrative ability index.

b SE t p
Intercept 0.02 0.06 0.34 .73
Phonological awareness 0.11 0.06 1.70 .09
Grammar 0.05 0.07 0.83 .41
Vocabulary 0.26 0.07 4.07 .00*
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*

p < .05 (statistically significant).

Quantile Regression Results for Children at Below Average, Median, and High NAI Scores

A quantile regression analysis was conducted to address the primary research question of whether the associations between lower-level language skills and narrative were different across different narrative ability levels. Different patterns of association were observed for lower-level language measures and NAI scores for below average, average, and precocious narrators. These patterns are described in detail below.

Children performing below average on NAI scores. At the 20th percentile, or 0.2 quantile, representing children lower on NAI scores, both phonological awareness and expressive vocabulary were significantly associated with NAI scores (see Figure 2). The estimated correlation coefficient for phonological awareness, b = 0.285, t(298) = 4.94, p < .001, may be interpreted as follows: Two children at the 20th quantile in NAI scores who differ by 1 SD in phonological awareness (i.e., children who are average on phonological awareness compared to those who are 1 SD above the mean on phonological awareness) are predicted to differ in NAI scores by 0.285 SDs. Similarly, the slope coefficient for vocabulary, b = 0.19, t(298) = 3.05, p < .01, represents the difference in estimated performance on NAI scores for children who are average on vocabulary compared to those who are 1 SD above the mean on vocabulary.

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

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Quantile regression results for the 20th percentile on the narrative ability index. Correlation coefficient estimates are depicted for phonological awareness (PA), grammar, and vocabulary.

Children performing at median level on NAI scores. At the 50th percentile, or 0.5 quantile, representing performance at the mean level for any given age, both expressive vocabulary and grammar were significantly associated with NAI scores (see Figure 3). Vocabulary, which was significantly associated with NAI scores in the linear regression, was similarly significantly associated with NAI scores at this quantile, b = 0.23, t(298) = 3.02, p < .01. However, in contrast to the linear regression results, grammar was a significant unique contributor to NAI scores at this quantile, b = 0.17, t(298) = 2.00, p = .047.

Figure 3.

Figure 3.

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Quantile regression results for the 50th percentile on the narrative ability index. Correlation coefficient estimates are depicted for phonological awareness (PA), grammar, and vocabulary.

Precocious narrators. At the 80th percentile, or 0.8 quantile, which we consider to be representative of highly precocious narrators, vocabulary was the only lower-level language skill accounting for a significant amount of variance in children's NAI scores (see Figure 4). The slope coefficient, b = 0.25, t(298) = 2.65, p < .01, reflects the difference in estimated NAI scores for children who are average on vocabulary compared to those who are 1 SD above the mean on vocabulary.

Figure 4.

Figure 4.

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Quantile regression results for the 80th percentile on the narrative ability index. Correlation coefficient estimates are depicted for phonological awareness (PA), grammar, and vocabulary.

Overall patterns in the associations between the predictor variables and NAI scores across all quantiles are depicted in Figure 5. As can be seen in this graph, vocabulary was consistently associated with NAI scores across all quantiles, whereas phonological awareness was only significantly associated with NAI scores at the 0.2–0.4 quantiles and grammar was only significantly associated with NAI scores at the 0.5 and 0.6 quantiles.

Figure 5.

Figure 5.

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Quantile regression results for all predictors at each quantile on the narrative ability index. PA = phonological awareness.

Discussion

This study is the first, to our knowledge, to examine how lower-level language skills are associated with the narrative skills of children across a spectrum of narrative ability levels, ranging from children who are below average, to average, to highly precocious in their narrative abilities compared to their peers. Much of the theoretical work on how children develop narrative abilities either has been descriptive in nature, outlining distinct qualitative shifts in children's storytelling performance across different ages or stages (e.g., Applebee, 1978), or has focused on the cognitive competencies underlying narrative performance, such as the acquisition and consolidation of story schema (e.g., Stein & Glenn, 1979). Less efforts have been focused on understanding the lower-level processes supporting narrative ability and helping explain individual differences in this skill domain. In particular, there is a dearth of research on the contribution of lower-level language skills such as vocabulary, grammar, and phonological awareness to children's storytelling/retelling performance across a spectrum of ability levels. Such work has the potential to enhance theoretical understanding of the developmental constraints on narrative development and identify potential malleable targets for instruction For instance, by identifying correlates of narrative ability in children with less developed narrative skills, researchers can explore whether improvements in these correlates (e.g., vocabulary) lead to improvements in higher-level language skills. Below, we interpret our main findings and discuss implications for theoretical models of narrative development and narrative instruction.

Contribution of Lower-Level Language Skills to the NAI

The first major finding of this study was that lower-level language skills, including vocabulary, grammar, and phonological awareness, together accounted for approximately 13% of variance in the NAI. This finding suggests that lower-level language skills, while contributing significantly to narrative abilities, only help explain narrative skill to a modest extent and that other skills and experiences not measured in this study may have more explanative power in accounting for variance in children's narrative ability levels. Some candidate variables identified in prior research as being implicated in language production tasks requiring planning and recall include cognitive skills, such as working memory and processing speed, as well as executive function skills, including inhibitory control and planning abilities (Ketelaars et al., 2012; Montgomery et al., 2009). Additional important factors that may help explain variation in narrative ability levels may be differential sociocultural experiences, such as richer and more frequent exposure to narratives (e.g., Sénéchal et al., 2008), and greater experience with perspective-taking (e.g., Kim, 2016). Future research should examine how these additional skills and experiences, as well as higher-level language skills such as inferencing and comprehension monitoring, help explain different ability levels of narrative performance in young children.

Differential Associations Between Lower-Level Language and Narrative Skills at Different Points in the Narrative Ability Spectrum

The second major finding of this study is that the lower-level language skills that were associated with and explained variance in narrative skills differed for children who were below average or average in their narrative retelling skills compared to children whose narrative performance exceeded levels expected for their age. Specifically, both phonological awareness and vocabulary were significantly associated with scores on the NAI at the lower end of the continuum; in contrast, both vocabulary and grammar were significantly associated with NAI scores at the median point of the continuum, and only vocabulary helped account for a significant amount of variance in NAI scores at the high end. It should be noted that, in this study, 3- to 6-year-old children at the higher end on NAI scores had narrative abilities that exceeded expected levels for their age as determined by the children in the current sample and were not necessarily the best narrators in an absolute sense. Of these children, those with better expressive vocabularies had better story retelling skills. The standard approach in the cognitive-developmental and clinical literature is to consider typically developing children as a homogeneous group when comparing their skills to other groups of children, such as those with developmental delay or LI. These results caution against considering typically developing children as a homogeneous group, as children at higher narrative ability levels may be relying on certain lower-level language skills to a greater extent than their less adept storytelling peers.

Differential Associations Between Vocabulary and Narrative Skills Across the Narrative Ability Spectrum

More specifically, this study's findings indicate that vocabulary, in comparison to grammar and phonological awareness, is most strongly and consistently associated with narrative skills across the ability spectrum and especially for developmentally precocious, preschool-age children. This finding is consistent with some of the prior work showing vocabulary to be a consistent and unique predictor of narrative organization skills in young children ranging from 3 to 7 years of age. For instance, in a study with 5- to 7-year-old children, Heilmann et al. (2010) found that narrative macrostructure performance (i.e., including settings, characters, conflict, and resolution, as well as references to mental states in a fictional story) was correlated with the microstructure measures of mean length of utterance (MLU), grammatical complexity (measured by a subordination index), and NDW, but only NDW was a unique predictor of narrative macrostructure in a regression analysis. The authors interpret this finding as suggesting that children rely mainly on their vocabulary knowledge to express narrative features at younger ages. Similarly, in a more recent study with bilingual preschoolers between 3 and 5 years of age, Bitetti et al. (2020) found that children's narrative macrostructure scores were uniquely predicted by lexical diversity (NDW) within each language but that associations between grammatical measures and narrative macrostructure were less consistently observed. In a similar line of reasoning, these authors speculate that, in contrast with their vocabulary skills, children's complex clause production may not be sophisticated enough to significantly impact narrative macrostructure at this developmental stage.

Indeed, there is evidence from the narrative development literature that children are still developing the ability to connect events within and across narrative episodes (i.e., individual sequences of goal-directed action plans) during the preschool period (see Khan et al., 2016). For the subsample of children who are starting to link events within and across episodes in their narratives and thus producing more coherent and well-formed narratives, they may be especially relying on their vocabulary skills to do so. This notion fits well with an idea put forth by Berman and Slobin (1994) that microstructural aspects of language (such as lexico-grammatical features) take on new functions that aid in the organization of narratives. For instance, prepositions may initially be used to describe locative aspects of distinct events (e.g., ran after the dog) and later be used in more sophisticated ways to connect events within a narrative account (e.g., after the discovery). Thus, vocabulary might be recruited in more and more sophisticated ways as narrative proficiency levels increase. In the case of this study, children with broader vocabularies may be more likely to not only include more temporal and connective words in their stories but also more character references (both pronominal references and adjectives describing characters and character actions) and evaluative aspects in their narratives (such as elongations, similes and metaphors, gratuitous terms, and emotional and mental state references). As the inclusion of such elaborative features in narratives would result in higher scores on the NAP-2, this account provides some insight into how vocabulary may support more advanced narrative skills.

This study's finding that vocabulary was a significant contributor across the spectrum of narrative skills and the sole lower-level language contributor to precocious narrative skills is also consistent with models of listening and reading comprehension (e.g., Perfetti & Stafura, 2014; Senechal et al., 2006), emphasizing the role of vocabulary in word-to-text and event-to-story integration. For instance, Perfetti and Stafura (2014) argue that knowing more words and concepts can support inference making within and across clauses and assist the listener (or reader) in building an accurate situation model of the story (or text). Thus, in addition to improving referential clarity at the word level, vocabulary skills may also support story-level comprehension and, in turn, story retelling skills. This consideration of vocabulary knowledge as supporting higher-level integration and inferencing would explain why vocabulary helps account for variance in the narrative skills of children whose story retelling skills exceed those demonstrated by their peers of the same age.

Differential Associations Between Grammatical and Narrative Skills Across the Narrative Ability Spectrum

Grammatical skill, in contrast, was not helpful in accounting for variation in narrative abilities at the higher quantiles or the precocious narrator group of children within the study sample. One possible explanation for this result is that although the NAP-2, the story retelling measure utilized in this study, assesses children on some aspects of grammatical complexity (such as use of conjoined adverbial phrases and elaborated noun phrases), more complex grammatical constructions are not included in the story script or scoring protocol. A stronger relation between grammar and precocious narrative skills may have emerged had either the stories been more grammatically complex in terms of their scripts or story microstructure items been weighted more heavily in the scoring of narrative skills. However, keeping in mind that items on the NAP-2 uphold the psychometric characteristics of validity and reliability for representing narrative skills (Bowles et al., 2020), we may interpret these findings to instead indicate that vocabulary is a better differentiator of narrative skills in this group of children compared to grammatical skill. A more likely explanation, and one raised earlier in this Discussion section, is that children's production of grammatically complex structures is limited at this developmental stage, particularly in a story retelling context, and thus does not significantly impact narrative structuring and organization.

Interestingly, expressive grammar was only significantly associated with NAI scores at the median point but not at the extreme ends of the NAI continuum. In fact, all three lower-level language skills individually helped account for variance in NAI scores at the 50th percentile in the NAI continuum, with expressive vocabulary showing a strong and significant association with NAI scores, followed by expressive grammar, and phonological awareness approaching significance at p < .1. These results suggest that for children who are demonstrating average narrative abilities for their age, all lower-level language skills are important in explaining narrative abilities. As a nice comparison, Bitetti et al. (2020) found that MLU, but not clausal complexity (indexing more complex grammatical abilities), was a unique predictor of preschool-age children's narrative macrostructure. In contrast, neither MLU nor clausal complexity was found to be associated with narrative skills of slightly older children between 5 and 7 years of age (Heilmann et al., 2010). If the developmentally precocious narrators in this study are performing more similarly to the slightly older sample in the Heilmann et al. (2010) study, then we might interpret this pattern of findings to indicate that grammatical skills only help explain narrative performance at expected levels for their age in preschool-age children. Theoretically, sophisticated grammatical skills, such as production of complex clauses, should support the production of narratives with more connections (e.g., “Then the boy was happy because he found a basket”) and elaborations (e.g., “Then the boy thought to himself, I have an idea”). However, as Bitetti et al. reported in their study, a sample of 200 preschoolers produced few complex clauses in their narratives—an average of only 0.76 clauses per C-unit. Thus, the lack of a significant association between grammar and narrative in developmentally precocious narrators in our sample might be driven by the infrequent use of complex grammatical structures in a story retelling context at this age. It is possible that as grammatical skills improve, greater associations are observed between grammar and narrative; in fact, there is evidence from the reading development literature that grammatical skills are particularly important and strongly associated with reading comprehension across a range of reading ability levels in third graders (LARRC & Logan, 2017).

Differential Associations Between Phonological Awareness and Narrative Skills Across the Narrative Ability Spectrum

Phonological awareness was only significantly associated with NAI scores at the lower end of the NAI continuum, representing typically developing children performing below expected levels for their age. Only a handful of prior studies have explored the association between phonological awareness and narrative skill in young children. For example, Storch and Whitehurst (2002) found that oral language (including story retelling skills) was significantly associated with early literacy skills (including word segmentation and rhyme identification) in prekindergarten and kindergarten. Similarly, Hipfner-Boucher et al. (2014) found that narrative skills accounted for significant variance in concurrent phonological awareness even after accounting for the effects of vocabulary skills. However, in the current study, the association between narrative and phonological awareness only held until a certain point in the distribution of narrative skills. A possible explanation for this finding is that the common processes subserving phonological awareness and narrative only provide a boost to a certain extent, beyond which language and especially vocabulary play a larger role. The reverse may also be true, in that narrative abilities may support emerging literacy skills, but growth in these code-related skills may only be anchored in oral language skills—and particularly narrative—to a certain extent. Further research needs to be conducted to identify the mechanism by which development in the narrative domain may exert an influence on the development of early literacy skills, and vice versa. For example, future studies should examine metalinguistic skills more directly and examine their association with phonological awareness. Longitudinal work is also necessary to examine the direction of effects so as to better identify predictors of narrative ability and the mechanisms by which progress in different lower-level language skills influences narrative development.

A comparison of the results of the two regression approaches is warranted. Both the linear and quantile regression analyses identify expressive vocabulary as being a significant predictor of narrative abilities. However, in addition, the quantile regression approach allowed us to examine how the associations between narrative and lower-level language skills change as there is an increase in narrative retelling proficiency relative to expected levels for one's age. A striking finding is that vocabulary skills contribute significantly to narrative skills across the continuum of narrative ability levels, with stronger and more consistent associations (relative to the other lower-level language skills) at the higher end of the continuum (see Figure 5). In contrast, phonological awareness only helps explain variation in narrative skills for children at the lower end of the narrative ability spectrum, while grammatical skills are only predictive of narrative skills for children demonstrating age-level (or average) narrative performance. Importantly, our results suggest nonlinear associations between lower-level language and narrative skills in preschool-age children, as the contribution of each of the three lower-level language skills varied at different points in the narrative ability spectrum, rather than there being a stronger contribution of each of these skills with increasing narrative ability levels. This pattern of results is consistent with an emergentist and dynamic systems perspective on language development, according to which dynamic convergences of continually evolving skills result in advances and qualitative shifts in language abilities (e.g., Marchman, 1997; Thelen & Smith, 1994).

Limitations and Future Directions

A few limitations of this study should be noted. First, the correlational design of this study prevents any causal inferences being made regarding the association between lower-level language skills and narrative abilities. Longitudinal work is needed to understand how individual differences in vocabulary, grammar, and phonological awareness, as well as higher-level language skills, may support growth in narrative abilities over time.

Another limitation that should be acknowledged is that the NAP-2 is a story retelling measure that, despite being designed to capture multiple aspects of children's narratives and have good content and construct validity, scores specific elements of children's narratives. It is possible, for example, that had our narrative assessment scored different aspects of narrative, such as clausal structure or decontextualized language, we would have observed a different pattern of results. Despite these limitations, this study makes an important contribution to the developmental literature by utilizing a novel approach to understanding patterns of associations between lower-level language skills and narrative abilities, assessed via a new measure with sound psychometric properties, across a continuum of narrative ability levels.

Conclusions and Implications

This study is descriptive and correlational in nature, and its primary aim was to enhance theoretical understanding of the integrative relations between lower and higher-level language skills early in development, with a particular focus on narrative ability. Results confirm the relevance of lower-level language skills in accounting for significant variation in narrative abilities, albeit to a modest extent, and further indicate that different combinations of lower-level language skills are associated with narrative performance at different skill levels. Specifically, vocabulary skills were found to be associated with narrative skills across the continuum of narrative ability levels (i.e., children with below average, average, and precocious narrative skills for their age) and especially so for children who are developmentally precocious in terms of their story retelling skills. Importantly, these findings suggest that developmental constraints on narrative skill development may be less rigid than proposed by stage-based models of narrative development (e.g., Applebee, 1978); at each age, some children outperformed their peers, and a unique characteristic of this group was that individual differences in vocabulary helped account for their narrative abilities. In contrast, phonological awareness and grammatical abilities were associated with narrative skills less consistently and only at or below expected levels of story retelling performance for children's age in our sample of 3- to 6-year-old children. Overall, these findings are generally compatible with the extant literature examining the association between lower-level language skills and emerging reading and listening comprehension skills, with early vocabulary knowledge and grammatical skills explaining more unique variance in reading achievement than phonological awareness alone (e.g., Catts et al., 2008; Hulme & Snowling, 2011). Additionally, our results, in conjunction with the prior finding that vocabulary and grammatical skills contribute more strongly to and explain more variance in reading comprehension skills at the lower end of the reading ability continuum in third graders (LARRC & Logan, 2017), suggest that lower-level language skills (and, in particular, vocabulary) may be a significant unique contributor to both early narrative and early reading comprehension skills.

This study's findings also hold potential implications for supporting narrative and language skills in preschool-age children. A plausible interpretation of our findings, pending validation through longitudinal work, suggests that different lower-level language skills may work in conjunction to support narrative skills for children at different points in the developmental spectrum of narrative acquisition. This, in turn, implies that instruction that supports narrative and language skills in preschool and kindergarten classrooms may need to be differentiated for children at different stages in the developmental process; children at the earlier stages may require more comprehensive support across various lower-level language skills, and a particular emphasis on integrating rich vocabulary instruction into storytelling activities may be beneficial, particularly for children already demonstrating sophisticated story retelling skills.

Acknowledgments

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A110293 awarded to Michigan State University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

Funding Statement

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A110293 awarded to Michigan State University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

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