Retelling skills of 10-year-old Greek-speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

This study examined the narrative retelling abilities of Greek-speaking school-aged children (ages 9-11) with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Addressing a gap in the literature, the study investigated group differences in macrostructural and microstructural narrative measurements and their diagnostic accuracy. Fifty children participated (25 DLD, 25 neurotypical), matched for age (mean = 10 years old). Analyses included correlations, MANOVA, Generalized Linear Mixed-effects Models (GLMM) and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC). Although the overall MANOVA did not show a significant multivariate effect, children with DLD scored significantly lower on Story Structure, Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), Subordinate Clauses, and Complement Clauses. GLMM analysis indicated that Story Structure and Complement Clauses significantly predicted group membership, while ROC analyses confirmed that Sentence Repetition is the most accurate diagnostic measurement with high sensitivity and specificity. These findings suggest that narrative retelling provides valuable insights into the syntactic and discourse organisation in DLD, complementing the diagnostic measurements of structured language tasks.