Mandarin-SLI

Li Sheng Language Science and Technology Hong Kong Polytechnic University dr-li.sheng@polyu.edu.hk

Citation information

Project Description

This project, titled Understanding Vulnerabilities in Narrative Performance in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder is funded by Hong Kong University Grants Committee and approved by the IRB (approval number: HSEARS20230314013).

All participants produced four narratives that varied by task type (retell vs. tell) and story length (short vs. long) at two time points, one year apart. In the narrative tasks, the Mandarin version of four widely used picture-based stories, commonly adopted in studies of children’s narrative abilities, were selected: Baby Bird and Baby Goat from the MAIN (Gagarina et al., 2019; Luo et al., 2020), and One Frog Too Many (Mayer, 1977) and Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969) from the Frog stories. The narrative tasks followed the MAIN protocol. In the tell task, participants were given time to browse the picture sequence before producing the story based on the pictures. In the retell task, they listened to a model story while viewing the pictures before retelling the story themselves.

The corpus includes narratives gathered over two years, with Year 1 involving kindergarten (K3; 6;2–7;10) and first-grade children (6;5–8;0) completing the narrative tasks. Specifically, the sample included 40 kindergarteners (DLD: 18; TD: 22) and 183 first graders (DLD: 65; TD: 118). Each child produced four stories, except for three children who produced two stories each and one child who produced three stories. In Year 2, 162 children who had advanced from Grade 1 to Grade 2 participated in the follow-up data collection (DLD: 60; TD: 102). Each child completed all four narrative tasks.

Please note this dataset is currently under embargo.

Acknowledgements