Story grammar assessment in Persian narrative discourse test

The Persian Narrative Discourse Test (PNDT), a tool for clinically evaluating the discourse of Persian-spoken children and adults, with and without special needs, has provided no measure to evaluate the story grammar. The present research was made to standardize the story grammar test to clinically evaluate Persian-spoken people’s narrative discourse, having communication disorders.

To evaluate the narrative using the Likert Scale, this study applied a five-level questionnaire to measure the clarity of the elements for four narrative sections in Thorndyke’s hierarchical model. Six linguists and six speech and language pathologists were consulted to determine if the proposed questions would encompass the observed behavioral range (story grammar), be easily understood and applicable for all examiners, and ensure that the questionnaire would have a high content validity indicator, according to the experts’ opinion. To specify differential validity, the story grammar was evaluated for both story retelling and improvised narrative creation assignments made by two groups of elementary students, with and without hearing disorders, in regular elementary schools. The reliability was examined as intra-rater and extra-rater.

In the setting and theme sections, no significant variation was observed between the average scores of hearing and hearing-impaired groups to create a narrative or retell a story, but in the sections of episodes (P<0.001) and resolution (P<0.001), the hearing group’s scorers were significantly higher than hearing-impaired one.

The validity and reliability of the Thorndyke -based test revealed that it is an effective tool for the clinical evaluation of story order.