Relationships between Narrative Ability and Working Memory, Sustained Attention, and Verbal Fluency in Early School-Aged Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

Objectives: The present study examined narrative performance in children with and without Developmental Langauge Disorder (DLD) and explored cognitive–linguistic factors associated with narrative generation and retelling.Methods: Participants were 13 early school-aged children with DLD and 25 typically developing children. Narrative ability was assessed using story grammar scores derived from narrative generation and retelling tasks. Cognitive and linguistic measures included verbal and nonverbal working memory (wordlist recall and symmetric–asymmetric matrices), selective sustained attention (TrackIt), and verbal fluency (semantic and phonemic fluency). Group differences were examined, and correlations between narrative performance and cognitive–linguistic variables were analyzed separately for each narrative condition.Results: Children with DLD demonstrated significantly lower story grammar scores than typically developing children in both narrative conditions. Both groups produced higher story grammar scores in the retell condition with no significant group×condition interaction. The DLD group showed significantly poorer performance in word-list recall and semantic fluency, whereas no group differences were found for other cognitive measures. Correlation analyses revealed no significant associations between narrative performance and cognitive–linguistic measures in the DLD group, except for a significant association between retell performance and nonverbal working memory. In the typically developing group, narrative performance in the retell condition was significantly associated with language composite scores and word-list recall, whereas no significant correlations were observed in the generation condition.Conclusion: These findings suggest that narrative abilities in children with and without DLD are differentially associated with linguistic and working memory factors depending on narrative task demands, highlighting the importance of considering task characteristics when examining narrative performance.