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Article
Corresponding author:
John Heilmann, Department of Communication Sciences and
Disorders, Mail Stop #668, East Carolina
University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA
E-mail: [email protected]
Language Testing
27(4) 603–626
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/0265532209355669
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Sensitivity of narrative
organization measures using
narrative retells produced by

young school-age children
John Heilmann
East Carolina University, USA
Jon F. Miller
University of Wisconsin – Madison, USA
Ann Nockerts
University of Wisconsin – Madison, USA
Abstract
Analysis of children’s productions of oral narratives provides a
rich description of children’s oral
language skills. However, measures of narrative organization
can be directly affected by both
developmental and task-based performance constraints which
can make a measure insensitive
and inappropriate for a particular population and/or sampling
method. This study critically
reviewed four methods of evaluating children’s narrative
organization skills and revealed that the
Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) was the most developmentally
sensitive measure for a group
of 129 5–7-year-old children who completed a narrative retell.
Upon comparing the methods
of assessing narrative organization skills, the NSS was unique
in its incorporation of higher-level
narrative features and its scoring rules, which required
examiners to make subjective judgments
across seven aspects of the narrative process. The discussion
surrounded issues of measuring
children’s narrative organization skills and, more broadly,
issues surrounding sensitivity of criterion
referenced assessment measures.

Keywords
assessment, ceiling effects, narrative, language development,
oral language, psychometrics
604 Language Testing 27(4)
Introduction
Oral narrative skills in children
Assessment of children’s oral narratives is of significant
interest to researchers and
practitioners, as being a proficient narrator is an important skill
in the life of young
children. Oral narrative skills are a key component of most
school curricula. In the
USA, each state is required to develop guidelines describing
skills that need to be incor-
porated into the general curriculum. While oral language skills
are often not formally
assessed in the general classroom, they are a key component in
each state’s guidelines.
For example, the state of North Carolina requires teachers to
facilitate mastery of nar-
rative comprehension as well as effective ability to produce
narratives and the complex
language associated with a literate speaking style (North
Carolina Department of Public
Instruction, 2004). Oral narrative skills have been incorporated
into children’s curricula
for good reasons. Being a proficient narrator is a skill needed to
express one’s intentions
and effectively participate in classroom activities. In addition,
several decades of
research have documented the strong link between children’s

oral narrative skills and
broader curricular requirements.
Research on monolingual English-speaking children has
documented that chil-
dren’s oral narrative skills are predictive of later reading
outcomes (Bishop &
Edmundson, 1987; Dickinson & McCabe, 2001; Griffin,
Hemphill, Camp, & Wolf,
2004; Hemphill & Snow, 1996; Roth, Speece, Cooper, & de la
Paz, 1996; Snow, 1983;
Snow, Dickinson, Jennings, & Purves, 1991; Tabors, Snow, &
Dickinson, 2001).
Additional studies have documented that children’s early
narrative competence is
related to broader academic outcomes (e.g., Fazio, Naremore, &
Connell, 1996;
O’Neill, Pearce, & Pick, 2004). Fazio and colleagues found that
oral narrative skills
were one of the strongest predictors for whether or not a child
later required academic
remediation, while O’Neill et al. identified a strong relationship
between young
children’s oral narrative skills and later mathematical ability.
While these studies
documenting the relationship between oral narratives and
broader reading and aca-
demic outcomes are correlational and a causal relationship
cannot be assumed, there
is a general consensus in the field that oral narrative skills may
play a key role in
developing the foundation for higher level academic tasks.
It is only natural that oral narrative skills are of interest to
those working with
children who have language impairments (LI). Approximately

7% of monolingual
English-speaking children experience significant deficits in
their oral language skills
despite normal cognitive skills (Tomblin, Records, Buckwalter,
Zhang, Smith, &
O’Brien, 1997). Children with LI have substantial difficulty
producing fully coherent
oral narratives (Boudreau & Hedberg, 1999; Fey, Catts, Proctor-
Williams, Tomblin, &
Zhang, 2004; Gillam & Johnston, 1992; Newman & McGregor,
2006; Pearce, McCormack,
& James, 2003; Reilly, Losh, Bellugi, & Wulfeck, 2004).
Assessment of children’s
narratives can be an effective method of identifying the
presence of LI (Allen, Kertoy,
Sherblom, & Petit, 1994; Paul & Smith, 1993) and provides a
functional description of
children’s performance, which may assist in the development of
treatment goals (Miller,
Gillam, & Peña, 2001).
Heilmann et al. 605
Oral narratives in bilingual children
Clinicians, teachers, and researchers are also interested in better
understanding the oral
narrative skills of children learning a second language. Just as
with monolingual chil-
dren, there is a significant predictive relationship between oral
narrative skills and read-
ing outcomes in children learning a second language (August &
Shanahan, 2006; Miller,
Heilmann, Nockerts, Iglesias, Fabiano, & Francis, 2006; Oller
& Pearson, 2002). Miller

et al. identified that measures from oral narratives predicted
reading scores within and
across languages in young school-age English language learners
(ELL). Given the strong
relationship between oral narratives and reading, it is important
to ensure that young
ELLs have sufficient oral narrative skills. Because a
disproportionately high number of
ELLs have poor reading outcomes when compared to their
monolingual counterparts
(August & Hakuta, 1997), there is a need for a better
understanding of the relationship
between oral narrative skills and reading outcomes.
Numerous speech and language scholars have recommended
using oral narratives in
clinical assessments of bilingual children, given the naturalness
of the task (e.g., Fiestas
& Peña, 2004; Munoz, Gillam, Peña, & Gulley-Faehnle, 2003;
Uccelli & Páez, 2007).
The act of telling stories is universal across cultures and is an
important instrument for
transmitting information (Mandler, Scribner,Cole, & DeForest,
1980); the format of tell-
ing a story may be more familiar to children from different
cultures than formal language
testing. Analysis of oral narratives across multiple languages
can provide an estimate of
relative proficiency in each language spoken and may assist in
differentiating language
differences, where a children may have limited proficiency in
one of their languages
spoken, from global language disorders, where children
demonstrate marked deficits in
all languages spoken (Gutiérrez-Clellen, 2002; Rojas & Iglesias,
2009).

Criterion referenced assessment
Oral narrative analysis falls under the broader umbrella of
criterion referenced (CR)
assessment. The goal of CR assessment is to generate a detailed
description of a child’s
performance in a target domain (e.g., narrative organization)
and to identify if the child’s
performance meets developmental expectations (Linn &
Gronlund, 2000). While the
purpose of standardized tests is to maximize differences
between individuals, CR assess-
ments afford clinicians the opportunity to obtain more detailed
data on specific skill
areas (Bachman, 2000). While standardized language tests
commonly evaluate limited
sets of skills that have been stripped of their communicative
context (Marquardt &
Gillam, 1999), most CR oral language assessments, including
narrative language sample
analysis, examine real-life communication situations and do not
rely on assessment of
decontextualized language skills.
Because CR assessments can generate rich descriptive data, they
are particularly use-
ful when describing the profile of a child exhibiting language
learning difficulties. While
children with LI share the same underlying characteristic (i.e.,
substantial difficulty with
language), there is considerable heterogeneity in the patterns of
difficulties experienced
by these children (Rapin & Allen, 1983; Tomblin, Zhang,
Weiss, Catts, & Ellis Weismer,

2004). Most standardized language tests provide subtest scores
that would appear to be
useful for describing children’s profiles (e.g., receptive
vocabulary; expressive syntax).
However, the measurement properties of subtests prohibit use
for providing accurate
descriptions of performance patterns; subtest scores are
generated from a relatively small
number of items, making them unreliable for interpretation on
their own (McCauley &
Swisher, 1984). In order to fully identify a child’s pattern of
language performance,
evaluations should use detailed CR assessments to identify
children’s strength and weak-
ness. For example, comprehensive assessment of children’s oral
narrative skills may
reveal relative strengths and weaknesses in using appropriately
complex vocabulary and
syntax, correctly referencing the characters, providing sufficient
description of the major
events, organizing the events of the story, and making the story
interesting to the listener.
Such assessment can provide a clearer understanding of the
nature of a child’s language
difficulties and may assist in the development of treatment
goals.
While CR assessment tasks have many admirable properties,
they can be difficult to
implement, given the unstandardized nature of the task. With
the increased call for use of
naturalistic and CR assessment tasks, there is a need to
understand better the measure-

ment properties of these assessment tasks.
Difficulties associated with developing CR assessments
As stated by Laing and Kamhi (2003, p. 46), ‘criterion-
referenced measures are only as
good as the developmental data on which they are based.’ In the
field of language devel-
opment, decades of research have provided a rich and expansive
literature documenting
the complexities associated with acquiring human language.
Language use is complex
and difficult to measure, as it encompasses multiple aspects of
form, content, and use
(Bloom & Lahey, 1978). At any stage of development, different
aspects of children’s
vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatic skills are at very different
stages of development.
To complicate matters further, language use is highly influenced
by the broader speaking
context; a behavior that appears to be immature in one situation
can appear to be mas-
tered in another situation (Elman, 1995). When identifying
appropriate CR assessment
measures, clinicians and researchers must critically evaluate the
assessment tasks and
sampling procedures to determine whether they are
developmentally appropriate and
will generate sensitive measures for the target population.
Ollendick, Grills, and King
(2001) stated that developmentally appropriate measures should
measure meaningful
behaviors that are sensitive to the children’s developmental
levels and be responsive to
changes in the context that may affect the sensitivity of the
measure.

Measures from children’s productions of oral narratives are
highly sensitive to
changes in the sampling context and discourse demands of the
task. Peña et al. (2006)
described how increased amounts of support provided to the
child, or scaffolding, facili-
tates children’s production of oral narratives. Factors affecting
the complexity and over-
all quality of a child’s narrative production include whether or
not the child had heard the
story before (Ripich & Griffith, 1988; Schneider & Dubé,
2005), how many times the
child had heard the story (Goodsitt, Raitan, & Perlmutter, 1988;
Martinez & Roser,
1985), familiarity with the events depicted in the story (Fivush,
1984; Hudson & Shapiro,
Heilmann et al. 607
1991), complexity of the story (Heilmann, Miller, Iglesias, &
Francis, 2009), and the
types of directions and expectations provided to the child (de
Temple, Wu, & Snow,
1991). For example, if a child is unfamiliar with a story, he or
she may have substantial
difficulty in organizing the complex events and including more
nuanced points of view.
If, however, a child is familiar with a story and is asked to
relate the story in a complex
manner, he or she will likely produce a longer, more detailed
story. Such variations can
present a problem for measurement of children’s narrative
organization skills.

Measuring children’s narrative organization skills
The ability to produce a coherent narrative is a complex
linguistic task that requires nar-
rators to plan and execute their production of the story’s
plotline by using appropriate
vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Studies examining the
development of narrative have
identified that all stories possess the same underlying
components, or story grammar
(Stein & Glenn, 1979). The story grammar literature has
proposed that all stories contain
a setting and episode system, which includes an initiating event
or problem, a reaction to
that problem, various attempts at resolving the problem, a
conclusion, and resolution. All
stories use some kind of combination of these story grammar
components. Developmental
studies have revealed that the acquisition of narrative
proficiency is a slow process, which
emerges in the preschool years and is not fully developed until
adulthood, with some
adults never becoming fully proficient narrators (Berman &
Slobin, 1994). Analysis of
children’s narrative organization skills has been described in
several clinical texts (Hughes,
McGillivray, & Schmidek, 1997; Strong, 1998), but the
measurement properties of the
various scoring procedures have not been empirically tested
with large samples.
Upon developing a series of narrative databases, the Language
Analysis Lab at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison was interested in identifying
a developmentally sensi-
tive narrative organization measure that that could be used on a
corpus of narrative retells

produced by children using the wordless picture book Frog,
Where are You? (Mayer,
1969). We first looked to the literature for sensitive narrative
organization measures for
this corpus and identified studies measuring narrative
organization in children who pro-
duced Frog, Where are You? The review was limited to this
specific story because it has
been extensively reported in the literature, follows a
prototypical story sequence, and
was to be used for several projects completed in the Language
Analysis Lab, including
the data summarized in this study.
The first major method for measuring children’s narrative
organization skills identi-
fied whether or not children included specific plotlines and
themes (i.e., plot and theme
analysis). When applying plot and theme analyses, examiners
developed a coding scheme
using the key story grammar elements for the target story. This
approach allowed exam-
iners to develop binary decision schemes that identified the
presence or absence of spe-
cific story grammar components. Children who produced a
greater number of plotlines
and themes were thought to have more advanced narrative skills
(e.g., Berman, 1988;
Botting, 2002; Boudreau & Hedberg, 1999; Miles & Chapman,
2002; Norbury & Bishop,
2003; Reilly, Losh, Bellugi, & Wulfeck, 2004). An example of a
plot and theme analysis
is provided in Appendix A.

The second major class of narrative organization measures
relied on holistic judgments
of children’s narrative proficiency (Applebee, 1978; Hedberg &
Westby, 1993; Stein,
1988). While the text-level analyses also documented children’s
production of story gram-
mar components, they were not measured by counting the
presence or absence of specific
plotlines and themes. Rather, these measures required holistic
judgments by the examiner
to rate the quality and developmental level of the narrative. Two
contemporary studies
used the text-level measures of narrative organization for
analysis of Frog, Where are
You? Manhardt and Rescorla (2002) converted Applebee’s
categorical levels to an ordinal
scale to assess narratives produced by 8–9-year-old children
with histories of language
delay, while Pearce, McCormack, and James (2003) used Stein’s
scoring scheme to assess
narratives produced by children of 5 ½ years of age. A summary
and brief description of
these two holistic narrative scoring procedures is provided in
Appendix A.
Several of the reported studies compared performance on the
story grammar measures
across clinical groups with varying results. Reilly et al. (2004)
documented that their
story grammar analysis was sensitive to both age and group
differences in four groups of
children of between 7 and 9 years of age (children with specific
language impairment,
early focal brain injury, Williams syndrome, and typical

developmental histories). Pearce
et al. (2003) found significant differences in performance
between children with lan-
guage impairment and typically developing children at 5 ½
years of age. Boudreau and
Hedberg (1999), on the other hand, did not find any differences
between typically devel-
oping children and children with specific language impairment
on their narrative organi-
zation measure despite significant differences on each
additional measure collected from
the children’s narrative productions. McCabe and Rollins (1994)
also noted that the nar-
rative organization skills of children with language impairment
varied widely across
studies and attributed this variability to ‘the use of insensitive
means of scoring narra-
tives’ (p. 47). Further examination of the literature revealed that
these existing story
grammar measures may be too easy and potentially insensitive
for preschool and young
school-age children. For the plot and theme measures, Reilly et
al. documented that typi-
cally developing 7–9-year-old children, on average, produced
95% (11.4/12) of the plot-
lines and themes, while Boudreau and Hedberg documented that
their group of 5-year-old
children produced 78% (4.7/6) of the plotlines and themes. On
average, high success
rates were also noted for the text-level measures, with a group
of 8-year-old children
scoring 3.3/5 on the Applebee measure (Manhardt & Rescorla,
2002) and 5–6-year-old
children scoring 9/11 on the Stein measure (Pearce et al., 2003).
In identifying the best story grammar measure for analyzing

retells of a wordless
picture book, the potential sensitivity issue was compounded by
the sampling context.
Our corpus of narratives was collected using the retell
procedure, whereas most studies
from the literature did not provide an initial model of the target
story. Having children
retell a story provides a model story and assists children in
developing an understanding
of the story’s structure. Narrative retells have been shown to
contain more information
and incorporate a greater number of episodes than productions
of spontaneous narratives
(Ripich & Griffith, 1988; Schneider & Dubé, 2005). Our goal in
using the retell procedure
was to ensure that the samples represented the children’s best
narrative productions.
However, we anticipated that a simple story grammar analysis
would be ineffective for this
corpus of retells given that children include a greater amount of
information in their oral
Heilmann et al. 609
productions in the retell condition. Thus, we decided that
existing narrative organization
measures may not be appropriate and developed a new scale to
allow for more sensitive
measurement of narrative proficiency.
The Narrative Scoring Scheme: A comprehensive measure
of narrative organization skills
The Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) was developed by the
Language Analysis Lab at the

University of Wisconsin – Madison as a sensitive measure of
children’s overall narrative
organization skills. To make the NSS more sensitive for a wider
range of ages and for sam-
pling contexts that provide scaffolding (i.e., the narrative retell
procedure), two modifica-
tions were made from the other narrative organization measures.
First, the literature was
reviewed to identify later developing narrative organization
features that go beyond simple
story grammar analyses. Second, scoring procedures were
critiqued to identify methods
that may be more sensitive when evaluating more advanced
narrative productions.
In addition to incorporating basic story grammar features, fully
proficient narrators use
specific types of language features that define a literate style of
speaking (Bamberg &
Damrad-Frye, 1991). One way narrators use a literate style of
speaking is through the use of
metacognitive verbs, which include verbs used to describe the
characters’ thoughts and men-
tal states (e.g., think and know) and metalinguistic verbs, which
include words used to
describe characters’ speech and dialogue (e.g., say and talk; see
Nippold, 2007 and Westby,
2005 for a review). In their analysis of oral productions of Frog,
Where are You?, Bamberg
& Damrad-Frye contrasted productions from novice narrators
(i.e., young children) to those
from experienced narrators (i.e., older children and adults) and
found that use of abstract
language, including metacognitive and metalinguistic verbs,
were the key features that char-
acterized the more sophisticated narrative productions and

assisted the older narrators in
organizing the hierarchical relationships between the events in
the story. They found that
these high-level language skills were first seen around five
years of age, were not consistently
used until the later school-age years, and continued to develop
through adulthood. Additional
studies have documented that these abstract language features,
collectively termed literate
language, emerged during the preschool years (Curenton &
Justice, 2004), were more consis-
tently used as children progressed through adolescence
(Greenhalgh & Strong, 2001;
Nippold, 2007; Pelligrini, Galda, Bartini, & Charak, 1998), and
were not consistently or
appropriately used by children with language impairment
(Greenhalgh & Strong, 2001).
Another high-level skill that is positively related to children’s
narrative organization
skills is the effective use of cohesive devices. Halliday and
Hasan (1976) characterized the
various ways that children maintain concepts across utterances
through use of sophisticated
linguistic procedures, including referential cohesion, which is
the way that speakers main-
tain appropriate reference throughout the story with correct use
of nouns and pronouns,
conjunctive cohesion, which is the way that speakers combine
phrases and sentences with
conjunctions and conjunctive phrases, and lexical cohesion,
which is the way that speakers
choose appropriate words to link concepts across phrases and
sentences. Children with
language impairment have much more difficulty producing
cohesive features than their

typically developing peers (Hedberg & Westby, 1993; Liles,
1985; Strong & Shaver, 1991).
In addition to incorporating higher level narrative skills into the
NSS, we attempted to
increase the sensitivity of the measure by critically reviewing
the scoring procedures and
scaling of the measure. McFadden and Gillam (1996) compared
two methods of scoring
children’s narrative organization skills: discrete coding schemes
based on presence or
absence of story features and holistic ratings of children’s
narrative proficiency. They
found that the holistic ratings were superior to the discrete
coding schemes in discrimi-
nating between children who were typically developing and
children with language
impairment. These children were between the ages of 9;0 and
11;7. McFadden and
Gillam’s study demonstrated that holistic ratings can effectively
assess the inter-
utterance concepts and qualitative aspects of the story,
including the story’s sparkle (Peterson
& McCabe, 1983). To incorporate holistic ratings into a detailed
and descriptive rating
scale, the NSS requires examiners to make broad judgments
across the seven aspects of
narrative organization included in the scale.
The goal of this paper was to compare the measurement
properties of the NSS with
other methods of operationalizing narrative organization from

the literature. This study
provided a direct comparison of four separate scoring
techniques using the same pool of
transcripts and identified the measures that were most
developmentally appropriate. The
literature review revealed that many of the existing narrative
organization measures may
focus too much on early developing narrative skills, such as the
inclusion of key story
grammar components. We felt that incorporating higher level
narrative skills would
make the scale developmentally appropriate for young school-
age children who pro-
duced narratives with scaffolding from the retell procedure. In
addition, the NSS required
examiners to provide a level of holistic judgment to assess the
qualitative aspects of the
story. To assess the sensitivity of the measures, the distribution
of scores was evaluated
for each narrative scoring technique to determine which
measures were developmentally
appropriate for the participants and sampling context used in the
present study. This
study addressed the following question: Is the distribution of
scores from the NSS less
skewed than scores from three traditional narrative organization
measures when applied
to narrative retells produced by 5–7-year-old children?
Method
Narrative language samples were collected from 129 typically
developing children
between 5;0 and 7;0 years of age. The children were recruited
from public schools in the
San Diego County and El Cajon County school districts. The
school speech-language

pathologist (SLP) and the children’s classroom teachers
confirmed that the children were
typically developing by reviewing all academic records and
summative assessments. To
be included in the study, children had to be performing at grade
level and could not be
receiving special education or speech/language services. See
Table 1 for a summary of
the participants’ demographic data. The narrative samples were
collected by a practicing
SLP working in the schools under the direction of a project
coordinator. The SLPs met
with the project coordinator for three sessions to learn the
protocol, where they had the
opportunity to develop an understanding of the protocol, ask for
clarification, and prac-
tice administering the assessment.
Heilmann et al. 611
The children completed the narrative task in the retell
condition, where the examiner
read the target story aloud to the child, cued the child to follow
along with the pictures in
a wordless picture book (Frog, Where are You?; Mayer, 1969),
and then asked the child to
retell the story to the examiner. This procedure was adapted
from the Strong Narrative
Assessment Procedure (Strong, 1998). The children’s language
samples were digitally
recorded and later transcribed by research assistants (RA) at the
University of Wisconsin
– Madison. Each RA had at least 10 hours of training in
completing transcription of chil-

dren’s oral language samples. The narrative samples were first
transcribed using the
Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT; Miller &
Iglesias, 2008). After tran-
scribing the sample, the RA reviewed the written transcript and
completed the NSS scor-
ing (see Appendix B for scoring rules).
The NSS is divided into seven sections that assess seven
different aspects of narrative
organization. Three of the sections were modeled after the
original story grammar pro-
posals: introduction, conflict resolution, and conclusion. Use of
literate language skills
were evaluated with the mental states and character
development sections. The final two
sections evaluated children’s cohesion skills and included
referencing and cohesion.
Within each section, scores of 1 were administered if the child
demonstrated immature
performance, scores of 3 if the child demonstrated emerging
skills, and scores of 5 if
proficient performance was noted. After completing each
section of the NSS, the scores
were added together to generate a total NSS score, which could
range from 0 to 35.
To compare performance on the different narrative organization
measures, the NSS
scores were compared to scores using three additional narrative
organization measures
from the literature. For the plot and theme approach, the
protocol described in Reilly
et al. (2004) was chosen because it provided a balanced
combination of the core plot
components and key embedded episodes. For the text-level

measures, we used Manhardt
and Rescorla’s (2002) ordinal adaptation of Applebee’s (1978)
narrative levels and
Pearce et al.’s (2003) ordinal adaptation of Stein’s (1988)
narrative levels. See Appendix
A for a description of the scoring procedures.
Each of the narrative organization analyses was scored by a
trained research assistant.
To document inter-rater agreement, 20% of the narrative
organization analyses were inde-
pendently coded by the first author. Krippendorff alpha values
(Krippendorff, 1980) were
calculated with ordinal scaling to determine the level of
agreement between transcribers.
Table 1. Demographic information for the 129 children
completing the narrative retell task
Grade (n) Gender (n) Maternal education (in years)
Race/ethnicity (n)
Preschool: 3 Female: 69 M = 14.4 White: 87
Kindergarten: 79 Male: 60 SD = 2.5 Hispanic: 16
1st Grade: 47 Range = 9–20 Othera: 15
African American: 7
No data: 4
Note: Ethnicity data collected for children who were Hispanic
or Latino. Race data provided for all children
who were non-Hispanic or Latino.
aOther races/ethnicities include Arabic (2), Chinese (3),
Japanese (2), Korean (1), Filipino (5), Portuguese (1),
and Samoan (1).

Krippendorff established the following benchmarks for alpha
values: ≥0.80 is adequate and
values between 0.67 and 0.80 are acceptable for exploratory
research and drawing tentative
conclusions. The following alpha values were calculated from
samples used in the present
study: NSS = 0.79, Plot & Theme = 0.79, Applebee = 0.61, and
Stein = 0.69.
Results
The normality of the distributions was compared using skewness
and kurtosis statistics
(see Coolican, 2004, for a review). The skewness statistic
identifies if there is an unequal
distribution that goes towards the floor or ceiling. Skewness
measures of zero indicate a
perfectly normal distribution while skewness values exceeding
|0.8| have been described
as ‘noticeably skewed’ (Bourque & Clark, 1992, p. 69). If the
distribution of scores is
negatively skewed, then most of the scores are approaching
mastery levels, reflecting
that the measure was too easy for the child. The kurtosis
statistic identifies how closely
variables are bunched together; platykurtic distributions have
scores that are spread out
and leptokurtic distributions have scores that are bunched
closely together (Coolican,
2004). Skewness and kurtosis statistics were generated for all
four scoring procedures
using SPSS. The traditional kurtosis statistics were converted so
that they were on the
same scale as the skewness statistics, with zero indicating a

perfectly normal distribu-
tion. While these analyses do not generate tests of statistical
significance, they do allow
comparisons to be drawn regarding the relative skewness and
kurtosis across different
measures. A final method for documenting the relative
distribution of scores was to
establish a score representing near-mastery performance and
identify the percentage of
the participants that scored at or above that criteria, similar to a
procedure employed by
Helms et al. (2004). For the present study, achieving at or above
90% correct was con-
sidered near-mastery performance and therefore a ceiling effect.
Table 2 summarizes the scores acquired from each scoring
scheme, showing the full
range of possible scores, the range acquired from this initial
sample, the sample means
and standard deviations, the skewness and kurtosis statistics,
and the percentage of the
sample who scored greater than 90% correct on the measure.
The skewness statistics for
all of the narrative measures were negative, demonstrating that
the distribution of scores
were more concentrated towards the ceiling. Skewness for the
NSS was considerably
lower than the additional measures from the literature.
Furthermore, skewness statistics
exceeded |0.8| for the plot and theme, Applebee, and Stein
measures, demonstrating that
these measures were ‘noticeably skewed’ (Bourque & Clark,
1992). The kurtosis values
for each of the narrative measures were greater than zero,
documenting that the narrative
measures were generating leptokurtic distributions that had a

relatively large proportion
of scores surrounding the mean. Again, the kurtosis values were
noticeably greater for
the three measures from the literature (0.9–1.1) than scores
from the NSS (0.5), showing
that there was a more restricted distribution for the plot and
theme, Applebee, and Stein
measures. The final analysis identified the number of
participants who scored close to
ceiling, with the criteria set at a score equal to or greater than
90% correct. None of the
children scored above 90% on the NSS, while 30–35% of the
children scored above 90%
on the three measures from the literature. Histograms were
generated for each of the
Heilmann et al. 613
narrative measures to visualize the distribution for each
narrative organization measure
(see Figure 1). Examination of Figure 1 illustrates the heavy
weighting of scores near
ceiling and around the mean for the three measures from the
literature and the relatively
normal distribution of the NSS.
Sample Narratives
To further illustrate differences across the scoring techniques,
three samples were
selected and are available in Appendix C. The samples were
modified from their original
coded format to assist with readability. All codes required for
SALT analyses were

Table 2. Children’s performance across four separate narrative
organization measures
Possible range Sample range Sample Mean (SD) Skewness
Kurtosis > 90%
Plot & Theme 0–12 4–12 8.8 (2.0) −1.0 1.1 35%
Applebee 0–5 2–6 4.0 (1.0) −1.1 0.9 30%
Stein 0–11 2–10 6.8 (2.4) −1.0 0.9 30%
NSS 0–35 11–26 20.1 (3.2) −0.5 0.5 0%
Note: > 90% signifies the proportion of the sample who scored
above 90% correct on the measure.
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Plot & Theme
F
re
q
u
e
n
c
y
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
0 1 2 3 4 5
Applebee
F
re

q
u
e
n
c
y
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Stein
F
re
q
u
e
n

c
y
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
0 3 6 9 12 15 18 21 24 27 30 33
NSS
F
re
q
u
e
n
c
y
Figure 1. Histograms depicting the distribution of scores using
four narrative structure coding
schemes

removed, including word errors, utterance errors, mazes (which
include reduplications,
reformulations, and false starts), and slashes used to identify
bound morphemes and
contractions. While these codes are required for syntactic and
semantic analysis of the
narrative samples, they are not necessary to accurately analyze
narrative structure.
Samples 1, 2, and 3 reflect a range of performance on the
narrative retell task.
By simply reading the transcripts, even an untrained reader with
no experience in
analyzing children’s oral language can identify that sample 3 is
much poorer than the
other two samples. It is considerably shorter and more difficult
to follow than samples 1
and 2. Many readers will also note that sample 1 is more
advanced than sample 2. In
story 1, the narrator provided more detail, better described each
of the events, and used
complex language to make the story interesting for the listener.
Upon comparing the dif-
ferent narrative organization measures, each measure was
effective in identifying that
story 3 was less complete and more poorly organized than
stories 1 and 2. However, the
plot and theme and two holistic narrative organization measures
did not distinguish sto-
ries 1 and 2 from each other. Rather, the NSS was the only
measure sensitive enough to
reveal differences between the productions.

Discussion
Sensitivity analyses
This study compared the measurement properties of the NSS to
three other narrative
organization measures from the literature. Each of the 129
transcripts was scored using
the four scoring schemes summarized in Appendix A. Twenty
percent of the transcripts
were recoded by a second member of the research team to
document the level of agree-
ment between transcribers. Krippendorff alpha coefficients were
equivalent for the NSS
and plot and theme measures (α = 0.79), while agreement values
for the Applebee and
Stein measures (α = 0.61 and 0.69, respectively) were notably
lower. We anticipated that
the highest level of inter-rater agreement would occur with the
plot and theme measures,
as the coding task was limited to identification of specific story
components. We were
impressed that the coding procedures of the NSS facilitated
comparable agreement val-
ues when compared to the plot and theme measures and
strikingly higher agreement
levels than the two text-level scoring scales.
Upon comparing the distribution of scores across the four
scoring schemes, scores from
the plot and theme and text-level narrative organization
measures were noticeably more
skewed and leptokurtic than scores from the NSS,
demonstrating that the majority of the
scores were closely bunched together near the ceiling.

Furthermore, approximately one
third of the children demonstrated near-mastery performance
and were approaching ceiling
on the measures from the literature, while none of the children
approached ceiling on the
NSS. Upon scoring the narratives with the NSS, we observed a
wider distribution of scores,
a relatively normal distribution across participants, and ample
room for measurement of
children with higher and lower narrative skills. We hypothesize
that there were two reasons
for the increased sensitivity of the NSS. First, by incorporating
children’s use of literate
language and cohesion, the NSS measured skills that were later
developing and/or were
Heilmann et al. 615
present when children receive scaffolding. Second, by utilizing
examiner judgment, the
NSS was able to tap into the perceptual aspects of the narrative
process (i.e., ‘sparkle’) that
are missed by discrete scoring schemes. Use of a more sensitive
scale, such as the NSS,
may address the sensitivity issue described by McCabe and
Rollins (1994) and provide a
more sensitive measure that can distinguish between typically
developing children and
children with language impairment (cf., Boudreau and Hedberg,
1999).
Because children’s narrative skills continue to develop through
the school years, a
more sensitive measure that assesses higher level narrative

features allows clinicians and
researchers to document narrative organization skills in older
school-age children. In the
present study, the child with the strongest narrative
organization skills received a score
of 26 on the NSS, while a perfect score would be 35. Based on
these data, there are an
additional 9 points that can be earned on the NSS for even the
best narrators. We predict
that NSS scores continue to increase in older children with
stronger language skills and
continue to develop additional reference databases to evaluate a
wider range of ages.
It is important to note that the data from the present study were
potentially constrained
by the limited sampling context. The data were acquired from a
relatively short and sim-
ple story. The extensive use of Frog, Where are You? in the
literature has greatly increased
our understanding of how children develop narrative
proficiency. However, additional
work is needed to document the effect of different stories on
measures of narrative orga-
nization. The plot and theme and text-level narrative
organization measures may be more
sensitive when children have the opportunity to produce longer
and more complex narra-
tives. From a clinical standpoint, however, increasing the story
length and complexity
increases the time requirements for elicitation and analysis of
the language samples. Our
goal was to use a story that could be collected and analyzed
quickly and efficiently.
Use of the NSS in research, educational, and clinical contexts

Research examining the mastery of oral narrative skills in
children can assist in better
understanding of the development of broader cognitive skills.
Studies of children’s
developing narrative have improved our understanding of the
development of cognitive
schemas; Berman and Slobin (1994) completed the most
comprehensive description of
the relationship between linguistic form and function. The study
of narrative develop-
ment has also shaped theories about the relationship between
socio-linguistic factors and
developing narrative competence (Eaton, Collis, & Lewis, 1995;
McCabe, 1997; Peterson
& McCabe, 2004; Quasthoff, 1997) as well as the relationship
between oral narratives
and general cognitive skills, such as working memory (e.g., van
den Broek, 1997).
Having a sensitive measure of children’s narrative organization
skills, such as the NSS,
is essential for documenting children’s narrative organization
skills and will facilitate
further advancements of our understanding of human cognition.
A sensitive and feasible measure of narrative organization, such
as the NSS, has
important educational policy implications. While oral language
skills are a key part of
most schools’ curricula, curriculum based assessment in the
general classroom has pri-
marily focused on documentation of children’s reading skills
(see Reschly, Busch, Betts,
Deno, & Long, 2009). Continuing to recognize the important
relationship between

oral narrative skills and broader reading and academic
achievements will encourage
greater advocacy for regular assessment of children’s oral
narrative skills in the general
curriculum. However, for this to occur, teachers and
practitioners need to have sensitive
and efficient measures, such as the NSS.
The NSS can also be an important tool for clinicians working
with children with lan-
guage impairment and for those working with second language
learners. The composite
NSS score provides a single estimate of children’s overall
narrative competence that is
sensitive for young children producing narrative retells. Given
the flexibility of the mea-
sure, it is likely also appropriate to use with children producing
more complex and less
complex narratives than those produced by the children in this
study. NSS composite
scores may also be used to assist with the identification of
children experiencing lan-
guage learning difficulties. Several databases are available with
the SALT software that
allows clinicians to compare their clients’ performance to a
sample of typically develop-
ing speakers. One database summarizes NSS scores collected
from monolingual English-
speaking children producing narrative retells; the samples used
in this study are included
in that database. The second major database with NSS scores
was collected on a large
group of English language learners who produced narrative

retells in both English and
Spanish. In addition to a composite narrative score, the NSS
provides examiners with
estimates of children’s performance within seven different
aspects of the narrative pro-
cess. Examiners can examine the profile of performance across
each aspect of the NSS
to identify areas of relative strength and relative weakness,
which may assist with further
determining the nature of a child’s language impairment and
assist with the development
of treatment goals. Upon initiating treatment, the NSS can be
used to monitor children’s
progress during the intervention program.
Conclusion
Decades of research and clinical practice literature have
identified the limitations of norm
referenced testing and have identified CR assessment as a viable
alternative for overcom-
ing many of these shortcomings. CR assessments provide a
detailed description of chil-
dren’s performance when completing naturalistic and
meaningful tasks. With the call for
increased use of CR assessments, more rigorous testing of the
properties of these tasks
must be completed. When evaluating assessment measures,
factors influencing the devel-
opmental sensitivity of the measure should be considered,
including the linguistic features
under study and the scaling of the assessment measure. In this
paper, we reviewed four
different methods of measuring children’s narrative
organization skills and found that the
NSS was more sensitive than the three other measures for young
school-age children

completing a narrative retell procedure. These analyses
identified features that allowed for
more sensitive analysis of narrative organization skills,
including assessment of higher
level narrative concepts and incorporation of examiner
judgment across multiple narrative
features. These analyses also provided an example of methods
that can be used to evaluate
the measurement properties of additional CR assessment
procedures. Such analyses and
discussion are increasingly important as more clinicians are
implementing the CR assess-
ment into clinical practice.
Heilmann et al. 617
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Claudia Dunaway and the SLPs in the
San Diego and El Cajon school
districts for their assistance in collecting the narrative retell
data. We would also like to thank
Karen Andriacchi and all of the past and present members of the
language analysis lab who have
been dedicated to accurately transcribing and efficiently
organizing all of the language samples.
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Franklin & S. Barten (Eds.), Child
language: A reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stein, N., & Glenn, C. (1979). An analysis for story
comprehension in elementary school. In R. Free-
dle (Eds.), New directions in discourse processing, Vol. 2. (pp.
53–119). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Strong, C. (1998). The Strong Narrative Assessment Procedure.
Eau Claire, WI: Thinking Publications.
Strong, C., & Shaver, J. (1991). Stability of cohesion in the
spoken narratives of language-impaired and
normally developing school-aged children. Journal of Speech &
Hearing Research, 34(1), 95–111.
Tabors, P., Snow, C., & Dickinson, D. (2001). Homes and
schools together: Supporting language
and literacy development. In D. Dickinson & P. Tabors (Eds.),
Beginning literacy with lan-
guage (pp. 313–334). Baltimore, MD: Brookes.
Tomblin, J. B., Zhang, X., Weiss, A., Catts, H., & Ellis
Weismer, S. (2004). Dimensions of indi-
vidual differences in communication skills among primary grade
children. In M. Rice & S.
Warren (Eds.), Developmental language disorders: From
phenotpyes to etiologies (pp. 53–76).
Tomblin, J., Records, N., Buckwalter, P., Zhang, X., Smith, E.,

& O’Brien, M. (1997). Prevalence
of specific language impairment in kindergarten children.
Journal of Speech, Language, and
Hearing Research, 40(6), 1245–1260.
Uccelli, P., & Páez, M. M. (2007). Narrative and vocabulary
development of bilingual children
from kindergarten to first grade: Developmental changes and
associations among English and
Spanish skills. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in
Schools, 38(3), 225–236.
van den Broek, P. (1997). Discovering the cement of the
universe: The development of event
comprehension from childhood to adulthood. In P. van den
Broek, P. Bauer, & T. Bourg (Eds.),
Developmental spans in event comprehension: Bridging
fictional and actual events (pp. 321–342).
Westby, C. (2005). Assessing and facilitating text
comprehension problems. In H. Catts & A. Kamhi
(Eds.), Language and reading disabilities (pp. 157–232).
Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Appendix A: Narrative Organization Scoring Procedures
1. Plot and Theme (Reilly et al., 2004)
Plotline (8 points possible):
Setting – 1 point
Instantiation (frog escapes) – 1 point
5 main search episodes – 0–5 points
Resolution – 1 point

Theme (4 points possible):
Mention that the frog was missing and the boy was looking for
him – 0–2 points
Search theme mentioned through the story: 0 = no additional
mentions, 1 = one
or two mentions, 2 = three or more mentions
2. Ordinal adaptation of Applebee’s Narrative Maturity Scale
(adapted from Manhardt & Rescorla, 2002 and Hughes et al.,
1997)
1. Heap: events described with no central theme
2. Sequence: events related to a single theme; no causal links
between story
concepts
3. Primitive narrative: stories have a concrete core
4. Focused chain: story revolves around a central character
going through a series
of events, story well connected
5. True narrative: well-developed story that has a central theme
or moral
3. Ordinal adaptation of Stein’s story levels (adapted from
Pearce et al.,
2003 and Hughes et al., 1997)
1. Isolated description: description of random characters and
actions

2. Descriptive sequence: describe characters and actions, but no
causal
relationships
3. Action sequence: actions described in correct chronological
order, but no causal
relationships
4. Reactive sequence: series of actions with some causal
relationships, no goal-
directed descriptions
5. Abbreviated episode: story is goal-directed, but characters’
intent not explicitly
stated
6. Incomplete episode: characters’ intent is explicitly stated but
one of the following
episode components is missing: initiating event, attempt, or
consequence
7. Complete episode: story contains all three aspects of a
complete episode: initiating
event, attempt, and consequence
8. Complex episode: full episode is elaborated by including an
obstacle to obtaining
the goal
9. Multiple episode: story contains more than one episode
(either complete or
incomplete)
10. Embedded episodes: one episode embedded within another
11. Interactive episodes: use multiple perspectives to describe
events; multiple charac-

ters and multiple goals mutually influence each other
Heilmann et al. 623
A
p
p
e
n
d
ix
B
:
T
he
N
ar
ra
ti
ve
S
co
ri
ng

S
ch
em
e
C
ha
ra
ct
er
is
ti
c:
Pr
o
fic
ie
nt
Em
er
gi
ng

M
in
im
al
/I
m
m
at
ur
e
In
tr
o
du
ct
io
n
1)
S
et
ti
ng
:
1)

S
et
ti
ng
:
•
L
au
nc
he
s
in
to
s
to
ry
w
it
h
•
S
ta
te

s
ge
ne
ra
l p
la
ce
a
nd
p
ro
vi
de
s
so
m
e
•
S
ta
te
s
ge
ne

ra
l s
et
ti
ng
b
ut
p
ro
vi
de
s
n
o
a
tt
em
pt
t
o
p
ro
vi

de
d
et
ai
l a
bo
ut
t
he
s
et
ti
ng
(
e.
g.
, r
ef
er
en
ce

n
o
d
et
ai
l.
t
he
s
et
ti
ng
.
t
o
t
he
t
im
e
o
f

th
e
se
tt
in
g,
d
ay
ti
m
e,
•
D
es
cr
ip
ti
o
n
o
r
el
em

en
ts
o
f
st
o
ry
a
re
b
ed
ti
m
e,
s
ea
so
n)
.
g
iv
en
in

te
rm
it
te
nt
ly
t
hr
o
ug
h
st
o
ry
.
•
S
et
ti
ng
e
le

m
en
ts
a
re
s
ta
te
d
at
•
M
ay
p
ro
vi
de
d
es
cr
ip
tio

n
o
f s
pe
ci
fic
e
le
m
en
t
a
pp
ro
pr
ia
te
p
la
ce
in
s
to

ry
.
o
f
se
tt
in
g
(e
.g
.,
th
e
fr
o
g
is
in
t
he
ja
r)

.
O
R
2)
C
ha
ra
ct
er
s:
2)
C
ha
ra
ct
er
s:
•

M
ai
n
ch
ar
ac
te
rs
a
re
in
tr
o
du
ce
d
w
it
h
•
C
ha
ra
ct

er
s
o
f
st
o
ry
a
re
m
en
ti
o
ne
d
w
it
h
s
o
m
e
de

sc
ri
pt
io
n
o
r
de
ta
il
pr
o
vi
de
d.
n
o
d
et
ai
l o
r
de

sc
ri
pt
io
n.
C
ha
ra
ct
er
•
M
ai
n
ch
ar
ac
te
r(
s)
a
nd

a
ll
su
pp
o
rt
in
g
•
B
o
th
m
ai
n
an
d
ac
ti
ve
s
up
po
rt

in
g
•
I
nc
o
ns
is
te
nt
m
en
ti
o
n
o
f
de
ve
lo
pm
en
t
c

ha
ra
ct
er
(s
)
ar
e
m
en
ti
o
ne
d.
c
ha
ra
ct
er
s
ar
e
m

en
ti
o
ne
d.
i
nv
o
lv
ed
o
r
ac
ti
ve
•
T
hr
o
ug
ho
ut

s
to
ry
it
is
c
le
ar
c
hi
ld
c
an
•
M
ai
n
ch
ar
ac
te
rs

a
re
n
o
t
cl
ea
rl
y
c
ha
ra
ct
er
s.
d
is
cr
im
in
at

e
be
tw
ee
n
m
ai
n
an
d
d
is
ti
ng
ui
sh
ed
f
ro
m
s
up
po
rt

in
g
ch
ar
ac
te
rs
.
•
C
ha
ra
ct
er
(s
)
ne
ce
ss
ar
y
s
up

po
rt
in
g
ch
ar
ac
te
rs
(
e.
g.
, m
o
re
f
o
r
ad
va
nc
in

g
th
e
pl
o
t
d
es
cr
ip
ti
o
n
o
f,
em
ph
as
is
u
po
n

a
re
n
o
t
pr
es
en
t.
m
ai
n
ch
ar
ac
te
r(
s)
).

•
C
hi
ld
n
ar
ra
te
s
in
f
ir
st
p
er
so
n
us
in
g
c
ha
ra

ct
er
v
o
ic
e
(e
.g
., ‘
Yo
u
ge
t
o
ut
o
f
m
y
t
re
e’

, s
ai
d
th
e
o
w
l.)
.
M
en
ta
l s
ta
te
s
•
M
en
ta
l s
ta
te
s

o
f
m
ai
n
an
d
su
pp
o
rt
in
g
•
S
o
m
e
us
e
o
f
ev
id

en
t
m
en
ta
l s
ta
te
•
N
o
u
se
o
f
m
en
ta
l s
ta
te

c
ha
ra
ct
er
s
ar
e
ex
pr
es
se
d
w
he
n
ne
ce
ss
ar
y
w
o

rd
s
to
d
ev
el
o
p
ch
ar
ac
te
r(
s)
.
w
o
rd
s
to
d
ev
el
o

p
f
o
r
pl
o
t
de
ve
lo
pm
en
t
an
d
ad
va
nc
em
en
t.
c

ha
ra
ct
er
(s
).
•
A
v
ar
ie
ty
o
f
m
en
ta
l s
ta
te
w
o

rd
s
ar
e
us
ed
.
R
ef
er
en
ci
ng
•
P
ro
vi
de
s
ne
ce
ss
ar

y
an
te
ce
de
nt
s
•
I
nc
o
ns
is
te
nt
u
se
o
f
re
fe
re
nt
s/

an
te
ce
de
nt
s.
•
E
xc
es
si
ve
u
se
o
f
t
o
p
ro
no
un
s.

p
ro
no
un
s.
•
R
ef
er
en
ce
s
ar
e
cl
ea
r
th
ro
ug
ho

ut
s
to
ry
.
•
N
o
v
er
ba
l c
la
ri
fie
rs
u
se
d.
•
C

hi
ld
is
u
na
w
ar
e
l
is
te
ne
r
is
c
o
nf
us
ed
.
(C
on

tin
ue
d)
A
p
p
e
n
d
ix
B
:
(C
o
nt
in
ue
d)
C
ha
ra

ct
er
is
ti
c:
Pr
o
fic
ie
nt
Em
er
gi
ng
M
in
im
al
/I
m
m

at
ur
e
C
o
nf
lic
t
•
C
le
ar
ly
s
ta
te
s
al
l c
o
nf
lic
ts
a

nd
•
U
nd
er
d
ev
el
o
pe
d
de
sc
ri
pt
io
n
o
f
co
nf
lic
ts

•
R
an
do
m
r
es
o
lu
ti
o
n(
s)
re
so
lu
ti
o
n
r
es
o
lu
ti

o
ns
c
ri
ti
ca
l t
o
a
dv
an
ci
ng
t
he
a
nd
r
es
o
lu
ti
o
ns

c
ri
ti
ca
l t
o
a
dv
an
ci
ng
t
he
s
ta
te
d
w
it
h
no
m
en
ti

o
n
p
lo
t
o
f
th
e
st
o
ry
.
p
lo
t
o
f
th
e
st
o

ry
.
o
f
ca
us
e
o
r
co
nf
lic
t.
O
R
O
R
•
N

o
t
al
l c
o
nf
lic
ts
a
nd
r
es
o
lu
ti
o
ns
c
ri
ti
ca
l
•
C
o

nf
lic
t
m
en
ti
o
ne
d
t
o
a
dv
an
ci
ng
t
he
p
lo
t
ar

e
pr
es
en
t.
w
it
ho
ut
r
es
o
lu
ti
o
n.
O
R
•
M
an
y

co
nf
lic
ts
a
nd
r
es
o
lu
ti
o
ns
c
ri
ti
ca
l t
o
a

dv
an
ci
ng
t
he
p
lo
t
ar
e
n
o
t
pr
es
en
t.
C
o
he
si
o

n
•
E
ve
nt
s
fo
llo
w
a
lo
gi
ca
l o
rd
er
.
•
E
ve
nt
s
fo

llo
w
a
lo
gi
ca
l o
rd
er
.
•
N
o
u
se
o
f
sm
o
o
th
•
C

ri
ti
ca
l e
ve
nt
s
ar
e
in
cl
ud
ed
w
hi
le
le
ss
•
E
xc
es

si
ve
d
et
ai
l o
r
em
ph
as
is
p
ro
vi
de
d
o
n
t
ra
ns
it
io

ns
.
e
m
ph
as
is
is
p
la
ce
d
o
n
m
in
o
r
ev
en
ts
.

m
in
o
r
ev
en
ts
le
ad
in
g
th
e
lis
te
ne
r
as
tr
ay
.
•

S
m
o
o
th
t
ra
ns
it
io
ns
a
re
p
ro
vi
de
d
O
R
b
et
w
ee

n
ev
en
ts
.
•
T
ra
ns
it
io
ns
t
o
n
ex
t
ev
en
t
un
cl
ea

r.
O
R
•
M
in
im
al
d
et
ai
l g
iv
en
fo
r
cr
it
ic
al

e
ve
nt
s.
O
R
•
E
qu
al
e
m
ph
as
is
o
n
al
l e
ve

nt
s.
C
o
nc
lu
si
o
n
•
S
to
ry
is
c
le
ar
ly
w
ra
pp
ed
u

p
us
in
g
ge
ne
ra
l
•
S
pe
ci
fic
e
ve
nt
is
c
o
nc
lu
de
d,
b

ut
n
o
•
S
to
ps
n
ar
ra
ti
ng
a
nd
c
o
nc
lu
di
ng
s
ta

te
m
en
ts
s
uc
h
as
‘a
nd
t
he
y
g
en
er
al
s
ta
te
m
en
t

m
ad
e
as
t
o
t
he
l
is
te
ne
r
m
ay
n
ee
d
to
a
sk

w
er
e
to
ge
th
er
a
ga
in
h
ap
py
a
s
co
ul
d
be
’.
c
o
nc
lu

si
o
n
o
f
th
e
w
ho
le
s
to
ry
.
i
f
th
at
is
t
he
e
nd

.
N
ot
es
:
Sc
o
ri
ng
: E
ac
h
ch
ar
ac
te
ri
st
ic
r
ec
ei
ve
s

a
sc
al
ed
s
co
re
0
–5
. P
ro
fic
ie
nt
c
ha
ra
ct
er
is
ti
cs
=
5

, E
m
er
gi
ng
=
3
, M
in
im
al
/
Im
m
at
ur
e
=
1
. S
co
re
s
in
b

et
w
ee
n
(e
.g
.,
2,
4
)
ar
e
un
de
fin
ed
, u
se
ju
dg
m
en
t.

Sc
o
re
s
o
f 0
, N
A
a
re
d
ef
in
ed
b
el
o
w
. A
c
o
m
po
si

te
is
s
co
re
d
by
a
dd
in
g
th
e
to
ta
l o
f t
he
c
ha
ra
ct
er
is

ti
c
sc
o
re
s.
H
ig
he
st
s
co
re
=
3
5.
A
s
co
re
o
f 0
is
g

iv
en
fo
r
C
hi
ld
E
rr
o
rs
(
i.e
.,
te
lli
ng
t
he
w
ro
ng
s
to

ry
, c
o
nv
er
si
ng
w
it
h
ex
am
in
er
, n
o
t
co
m
pl
et
in
g/
re
fu

si
ng
t
as
k,
u
si
ng
w
ro
ng
la
ng
ua
ge
c
re
at
in
g
in
ab
ili
ty

o
f s
co
re
r
to
c
o
m
pr
eh
en
d
st
o
ry
in
t
ar
ge
t
la
ng
ua

ge
, a
ba
nd
o
ne
d
ut
te
ra
nc
es
, u
ni
nt
el
lig
ib
ili
ty
, p
o
o
r
pe

rf
o
rm
an
ce
, c
o
m
po
ne
nt
s
o
f r
ub
ri
c
ar
e
in
im
it
at
io
n-

o
nl
y)
.
A
s
co
re
o
f N
A
(
no
n-
ap
pl
ic
ab
le
)
is
g
iv
en

fo
r
M
ec
ha
ni
ca
l/E
xa
m
in
er
/O
pe
ra
to
r
Er
ro
rs
(
i.e
.,
in

te
rf
er
en
ce
fr
o
m
b
ac
kg
ro
un
d
no
is
e,
is
su
es
w
it
h
re

co
rd
in
g
(c
ut
-o
ffs
, i
nt
er
ru
pt
io
ns
),
ex
am
in
er
q
ui
tt
in

g
be
fo
re
c
hi
ld
d
o
es
, e
xa
m
in
er
n
o
t
fo
llo
w
in
g
pr

o
to
co
l,
ex
am
in
er
a
sk
in
g
o
ve
rl
y
sp
ec
ifi
c
o
r
le
ad

in
g
qu
es
ti
o
ns
r
at
he
r
th
an
o
pe
n-
en
de
d
qu
es
ti
o
ns
o

r
pr
o
m
pt
s)
.
Heilmann et al. 625
Appendix C: Sample Narratives
Sample 1:
A little boy went out one day and caught a frog. He put the frog
in a jar and stared at him
when he got in his room again. The dog looked in the jar and
saw the frog too. While the
boy was sleeping the frog jumped down and ran out the window,
while he was sleeping.
The next morning the boy woke up and looked at the jar. The
frog was not inside the jar.
The boy looked everywhere. The dog put his head inside the jar.
His head got stuck. Then
they looked out the window and called for the frog to come
back. The dog fell off the thing
and the jar broke. The boy picked him up to see if he was OK.
And the dog licked him for
that. The dog and the boy went out in the backyard and went in
the forest. They searched
and searched and searched. But they still couldn’t find the frog.
The little boy crawled in a

gopher’s hole. The gopher popped out and started running away.
The dog was barking at a
beehive. And the beehive fell down. And a swarm of bees came
out that minute while the
boy was looking inside a tree. The bees swarmed and chased the
dog. The owl creeped out
and scared the boy away. After that he climbed up a tall rock
and leaned on some branches.
They started moving upwards and turning. This was a deer and
not real branches. The dog
ran with the deer and started barking at the deer. The deer
stopped in a sudden moment.
And the boy and the dog fell down. They landed in a warm pond
and heard the sound of a
croak. The boy told the dog to be quiet because if he wasn’t
then the frog would hop away
because of the babyies over a dead log. They found his old frog
with a mama frog. And they
had eight tiny babies. One jumped up to his hand to greet the
boy. The boy liked him. And
the frog liked him also. So he took that frog for a new pet and
left the other frogs together
so the family would be safe. And they had seven tiny babies to
take care of, not one.
Plot & Theme: 11 (search theme reiterated only twice)
Applebee: 5
Stein: 10
NSS: 26
• Introduction:4
• CharacterDev:4
• MentalStates:2
• Referencing:4
• ConflictRes:4
• Cohesion:4

• Conclusion:4
Sample 2:
Once there was a little boy named Tom. He had a little frog and
a dog. One night, when Tom
and his dog were sleeping, the frog crept away. When Tom and
his dog leaned over the next
morning, the frog was gone. He looked everywhere for the frog.
He called out the window.
When he looked into the jar, his head got stuck in the jar. And
when he leaned over, he fell out
the window. And Tom jumped out and picked him up to see if
he was OK. He gave him a lick.
And then Tom spent the rest of the day looking for his frog. He
called down the hole but there
was a gopher. The dog barked at a tree and some bees scared
them. Tom looked into a tree hole.
There’s an owl. He climbed up a big rock. And he leaned onto
some big branches. But they
weren’t branches. They were a deer’s antlers. And the deer ran
with Tom on his head. He put
the dog and Tom in the water. And they snuck up very quietly.
And they found his frog and lots
of other frogs. He took the baby frog as his new pet. And he
waved bye to his old frogs.
Plot & Theme: 11 (search theme reiterated only once)
Applebee: 5
Stein: 10
NSS: 21

• Introduction:3
• CharacterDev:3
• MentalStates:2
• Referencing:3
• ConflictRes:3
• Cohesion:4
• Conclusion:3
Sample 3:
The boy was looking for his frog. All day he looked for the frog
and couldn’t find him.
Finally a beehive, the dog barked at a beehive in the tree. And
the dog got in trouble. And
so did the boy because the gopher and the owl. And ran away.
And then he chased the
dog. And he looked out from it. And then he climbed on the
branch. But it wasn’t
branches. It was a deer. And the deer shoved him off of the
cliff. And then he went to the
frog. And he had a family. And then a frog jumped out to get
him. And then he took that
frog home and left his old frog where his old frog was.
Plot & Theme: 5 (Plot: 2 search episodes (beehive and deer
scenes), resolution; Theme: initial
mention that the boy was looking for the frog, one additional
mention of searching for the frog)
Applebee: 3
Stein: 5 (Abbreviated Episode): Story is goal-directed (i.e.,
searching for the frog). But,
there are no complete episodes in the story.
NSS: 14

• Introduction: 1
• CharacterDev: 3
• MentalStates: 1
• Referencing: 3
• ConflictRes: 1
• Cohesion: 2
• Conclusion: 3
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The Development of Narrative Identity in Late Adolescence and
Emergent
Adulthood: The Continued Importance of Listeners
Monisha Pasupathi
University of Utah
Timothy Hoyt
University of New Mexico
Research on narrative identity in late adolescence and early
adulthood has not extensively examined how
conversational storytelling affects the development of narrative

identity. This is a major gap, given the
importance of this age period for narrative identity development
and the clear importance of parent– child
conversations in the development of narrative identity. The
authors present a series of 3 studies (n � 220)
examining how late adolescents and early adults construct
narrative identity in ways that are shaped by
their listeners. The findings suggest that late adolescents and
early adults construct more meaning-laden,
interpretive accounts of their everyday experiences when they
converse with responsive friends. Further,
even within this sample’s abbreviated age range, the authors
found evidence for age-related increases in
the factual content of personal memories. Such findings
illuminate the importance of friends in the
construction of narrative identity during this key developmental
period.
Keywords: narrative identity development, autobiographical
memory development, parent– child remi-
niscing, social construction
Late adolescence and early adulthood are accorded special sig-
nificance for the development of self and identity (Arnett, 2000;
Dusek & McIntyre, 2003; Erikson & Erikson, 1997; Harter,
1998;
Kroger, 2003), narrative identity (Habermas & Bluck, 2000;
McLean, 2005), and autobiographical memory (Holmes & Con-
way, 1999; Rubin & Schulkind, 1997). In fact, work on the
reminiscence bump suggests that adolescence and early
adulthood
are a privileged developmental period for the encoding of auto-
biographical memories, which in narrative terms constitute the
stuff of which selves are made.
But despite the widespread acknowledgment of the importance

of late adolescence and early adulthood for identity
development,
there are some important gaps in existing research. Perhaps
most
notable among these is a relative lack of attention to the micro-
processes by which identity in general and narrative identity in
particular develop during this period. In the present article, our
focus is particularly on the microprocess of conversational
story-
telling as a critical process by which narrative identity more
broadly develops. Further, we show, across three studies, that
having responsive, attentive friends as listeners for
conversational
storytelling helps further narrative identity development in late
adolescence and early adulthood. Next, we outline the
unaddressed
issues in identity development work that can be better examined
with the narrative and, more specifically, conversational
storytell-
ing frameworks.
Identity Development in Adolescence
and Early Adulthood
Erikson and Erikson (1997) originally defined ego identity as
entailing a sense of uniqueness or individuality, an emerging
commitment to a place in society, and a sense of continuity over
time. Much of the extant work on identity development, as well
as work on self-development, has emphasized the uniqueness or
individuality aspect of self and identity by focusing on explicit
self-descriptive statements that participants do or do not en-
dorse. Research in this arena has suggested that identity devel-
opment in terms of exploring alternative identities and commit-
ting to some rather than others is a nonlinear process that
appears to occur primarily in late adolescence and early adult-

hood (Constantinople, 1969; Meilman, 1979; Waterman, 1982).
Over adolescence and early adulthood, self-descriptions be-
come increasingly multifaceted and complex, and changes in
the content of self-descriptions also occur into early adulthood
(Dusek & McIntyre, 2003; Harter, 1998; Sutin & Robins, 2005).
The ability to recognize contradictions in the self emerges by
midadolescence, but the capacity for resolving them is a phe-
nomenon of later adolescence (Harter & Monsour, 1992), con-
sistent with increasing cognitive and epistemic abilities across
this period (e.g., Kitchener, Lynch, Fischer, & Wood, 1993).
Contextual factors such as parent– child relationships, peer re-
lationships, and exposure to college and larger sociopolitical
contexts are linked to identity development over this age range
(Dusek & McIntyre, 2003; Hair, Moore, Garrett, Ling, & Cleve-
land, 2008; McNulty & Swann, 1994; Waterman, 1982).
This literature underscores the importance of late adolescence
and early adulthood for identity development but is relatively
Monisha Pasupathi, Department of Psychology, University of
Utah;
Timothy Hoyt, Department of Psychology, University of New
Mexico.
These studies were supported by National Institute of Mental
Health
Grant 1R03MH64462 awarded to Monisha Pasupathi. Our
gratitude is due
to Benjamin Rich, for his extensive efforts in data collection, as
well as to
Martin Cryer and Leslie Rheinhold, who assisted with data
coding. In
addition, Carol Sansone, Kate McLean, and Frank Drews
provided valu-
able comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Monisha
Pasupathi, Department of Psychology, University of Utah, 390
South 1530
East, Beh-502, Salt Lake City, UT 84112. E-mail:
[email protected]
Developmental Psychology © 2009 American Psychological
Association
2009, Vol. 45, No. 2, 558 –574 0012-1649/09/$12.00 DOI:
10.1037/a0014431
558
uninformative about the microprocesses by which identity is
con-
structed in that age period and does not capture the way in
which
people construct a sense of themselves as continuous across
time.
As an alternative, narrative approaches to identity development
capture both individuality and the continuity aspects of identity,
and their focus on the construction of identity is one step closer
to
an examination of the processes of identity formation.
Narrative Identity in Late Adolescence and Early
Adulthood: Closer to Process
Narrative approaches to identity development examine how
people construct meaning in relation to their experiences and
thus
further their sense of self and identity (McAdams, 1996). The
construction of narratives about past experiences also involves
the

creation of a sense of continuity over time—as the past self is
represented and interpreted by the present self. Thus, narrative
conceptualizations of identity hold the promise of integrating
Erikson and Erikson’s (1997) aspects of identity as well as illu-
minating the processes by which individuals develop identity.
For
example, narratives construct personal continuity over time by
linking past to the present and future. They also highlight
individ-
ual uniqueness and, at the same time, make use of cultural
scripts
and schemas for organizing one’s experience in narrative form.
In
fact, proponents of narrative identity research (McLean,
Pasupathi,
& Pals, 2007; Pasupathi, 2001; Thorne, 2000) have argued that
the
process of constructing narratives about the personal past is the
paramount process by which narrative identity in particular, and
self and identity more broadly, develop. In making this case,
they
specifically suggest that narrative identity develops via the
micro-
process of constructing specific narratives in specific situations.
That is, narrative identity emerges out of countless actions of
narrative construction. The study of narrative identity
development
consequently requires the exploration of processes that
influence
narrative identity creation in the moment.
It is important to note that narrative and narrative identity are
not synonymous. Although all stories must provide an account
of
what happened—the setting and actions that occurred— each
sto-

ryteller may have a unique sense of how the actions were con-
nected, which were important, and what the broader
implications
and associations of the experience may entail. These
interpretive,
meaning-laden features of a narrative render a set of facts
uniquely
reflective of the individual whose story they compose, and it is
these features that both reflect and construct narrative identity.
Moreover, it is these features that across various operationaliza-
tions are related to macrolevel development of self and identity
in
early childhood (e.g., Bird & Reese, 2006; Bohanek, Marin, &
Fivush, 2006; Fivush, 1991; Fivush, Bohanek, Robertson, &
Duke,
2004; Harley & Reese, 1999; Howe, Courage, & Peterson, 1994)
and in adolescence and early adulthood (McLean & Pratt, 2006;
see also Sutin & Robins, 2005), and to well-being and maturity
throughout adulthood (King & Patterson, 2000; McAdams,
Reyn-
olds, Lewis, Patten, & Bowman, 2001; Pals, 2006a, 2006b).
The overall elaboration of narratives, including both factual and
interpretive information, increases across childhood (e.g., P. J.
Bauer, 2006; Fivush & Nelson, 2004). Little is known about
changes in general elaboration thereafter. Researchers focusing
on
adolescence and adulthood have emphasized broader, global
types
of meanings; these are conceptually connected to interpretive
elaboration. The prevalence of those larger identity-related ele-
ments in narratives increases with age into middle adulthood (J.
J.
Bauer & McAdams, 2004a, 2004b, 2005; Bluck & Glueck, 2004;
McAdams et al., 2006; McLean, 2005; McLean & Thorne, 2003;

Pasupathi & Mansour, 2006), and they become more positive
and
more nuanced (McAdams et al., 2006). This work suggests, but
does not explicitly demonstrate, increases in the prevalence and
sophistication of interpretive elaboration in narratives from ado-
lescence into middle adulthood. Moreover, this work is largely
mute about just how such macrolevel increases might come
about;
that is, it does not necessarily investigate the processes by
which
people come to vary in their construction of narrative identity.
Conversational Storytelling: The Process of Constructing
Narrative Identity
Conversations about the personal past with caregivers are a
major force in shaping young children’s ways of constructing
narratives and developing narrative identity (see, e.g., P. J.
Bauer,
2006; Fivush & Nelson, 2004). Some parents engage children in
highly responsive, elaborative conversation about the past,
whereas others are more focused and repetitive (Cleveland &
Reese, 2005; Fivush & Nelson, 2004; Harley & Reese, 1999;
Reese & Fivush, 1993; Wang, 2004). Children with more elabo-
rative mothers subsequently engage in more elaborative remem-
bering with other listeners and about other events. Maternal lis-
tening, then, influences the story created within that
conversation
but over time exerts cumulative, long-term effects on children’s
style of remembering. Converging findings from experimental
(Peterson, Jesso, & McCabe, 1999) and prospective longitudinal
designs (e.g., Haden, Haine, & Fivush, 1997) provide strong
evidence for a causal role for parent– child remembering. For
very
young children like those studied in this work, parental respon-
siveness is important for both factual and interpretive

elaboration
in narratives. Further, the development of basic capacities for
narration and the development of narrative identity are tightly
intertwined during early childhood.
Within a burgeoning literature on narrative identity in late
adolescence and early adulthood (e.g., McLean et al., 2007),
however, we know surprisingly little about the role played by
conversational storytelling and the listeners for such stories.
This
is in spite of the acknowledged importance of identity develop-
ment in this age range and the fact that this period coincides
with
a shift from parents as the primary audience for personal story-
telling to friends as an additional, increasingly important
audience
for such stories (McLean, 2005; see also Buhrmeister, 1996;
Cooper, 1999; Daddis, 2008; Hartup, 1996; Hazan & Zeifman,
1994; Updegraff, McHale, & Whiteman, 2006).
Some tiny pieces of evidence from studies of adolescents and
emergent adults suggest that listeners are important in the con-
struction of narrative identity in this age range. For example,
conversational interactions with parents do matter. More open
and
free-ranging conversations with parents are associated with
greater
autonomy and identity development in adolescents (Cooper &
Grotevant, 1985). By early adulthood, friends and parents
appear
to serve similar purposes as listeners for personal events,
according
to retrospective reports (McLean, 2005). Further, conversations
with friends during adolescence are quite strikingly concerned
with identity (Korobov & Bamberg, 2004; Parker & Gottman,

559NARRATIVE IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
1989), and work with late adolescents suggests that listeners
prefer
narratives that entail more sophisticated identity-related
insights—
indicative of a listener preference for more interpretive
elaboration
(Thorne, McLean, & Lawrence, 2004). Some work with young
adults has linked the action of telling a personal story to
changes
in more traditionally assessed self-conceptions or event percep-
tions and has shown that variations in the way listeners respond
to
that story, or variations in the goals with which the story is told,
correspond to immediate self-perception changes (e.g.,
McGregor
& Holmes, 1999; McLean, 2005; Pasupathi, Alderman, & Shaw,
2007; Pasupathi & Rich, 2005; Thoman, Sansone, & Pasupathi,
2007).
A handful of studies have explicitly looked at variations in
listener behavior and storytelling among young adults (Bavelas,
Coates, & Johnson, 2000; Dickinson & Givon, 1995; Pasupathi,
Stallworth, & Murdoch, 1998). These studies examined story-
telling by young adults to a stranger and experimentally varied
the stranger’s behavior during storytelling. That variation cre-
ated either distracted or disagreeable listeners; the comparison
conditions always involved a responsive, agreeable listener.
Generally, responsive and agreeable listeners concurrently
elicit more elaborative stories than do distracted or disagreeable
listeners, whether about brief film stimuli (Dickinson & Givon,
1995; Pasupathi et al., 1998) or about personal experiences
(Bavelas et al., 2000). In fact, listeners in the responsive and

agreeable conditions behave more elaboratively than do listen-
ers in the distracted conditions, in these studies. That is, they
ask questions, make sympathetic exclamations, demonstrate
that they have understood the speaker’s point, and follow
the speaker’s interests rather than impose their own agenda.
These behaviors are quite similar to those observed among
more elaborative mothers in work on parent– child reminiscing.
One goal of the present studies was to demonstrate that the
development of narrative identity is affected by the process of
storytelling, by showing that the extent to which late adoles-
cents and early adults construct elaborative, richly detailed
personal stories is connected to the behavior of their listening
friends.
But as we noted earlier, not all elaborations are equally
relevant for narrative identity. Interpretive information in par-
ticular makes memory into narrative identity by tying recalled
experiences to the individual’s goals, feelings, thoughts, and
beliefs. In childhood, when memory conversations involve
learning how to remember, responsive listening is clearly linked
to elaboration of all types of information, although for self-
development the elaboration of interpretive or evaluative con-
tent is more important. By contrast, in adulthood, responsive
listening may be of particular importance for interpretive infor-
mation. In fact, Bavelas et al. (2000) showed that distracted
(and therefore unresponsive) listeners were selectively impaired
in their capacity to respond to the meaning of what storytellers
were saying, although they did not examine whether this cor-
responded to a selective suppression of storytellers’ inclusion of
such meanings. Thus, our second aim was to examine whether
responsive friends were especially important in facilitating the
construction of richly interpretive accounts of personal experi-
ences, that is, in helping late adolescents infuse memory with
narrative identity.
Overview of the Present Studies

The major goal of the present studies was to provide laboratory-
based evidence for the microprocess. Critically, these studies
were
not designed to address the macrodevelopmental process of nar-
rative identity process but, rather, to address the critical
micropro-
cess building block for narrative identity—the process of
conver-
sational storytelling. Other work suggests that if responsive
listening has immediate importance for narrative identity in the
short term, it will also have long-term implications for
macrolevel
self-development, an issue to which we return in the discussion
of
our findings.
The present studies examine in vivo storytelling about personal
experiences to close, same-gender friends by late adolescents
and
early adults (defined as the age range from 18 to 35 years). We
chose to examine storytelling to same-gender close friends
because
narrative identity suggests that close friends and family are the
primary audience for personal storytelling in adulthood and be-
cause close friends and parents appear to serve similar roles as
listeners among late adolescents and early adults (McLean,
2005).
Restricting the focus to same-gender friendships allowed us to
reduce the possible impact of different relationships between
lis-
teners and speakers (i.e., romantic vs. primarily platonic
relations).
We compared responsive and unresponsive (distracted) friends
during storytelling across three studies, examining how
variations

in responsiveness influenced the elaboration of factual and
inter-
pretive aspects of storytelling.
We chose experimental methods because exploratory work in
our laboratory suggested that under normal conditions, most
friends are fairly responsive listeners in a laboratory setting in
which there are few distractions and their defined task is to
listen.
Experimentally creating an unresponsive listener via distraction
ensured that some of our participants would not function like
highly elaborative mothers by asking questions or expressing
strong interest. Experimental methods also permit stronger con-
clusions about causality and link the present studies to work on
young adults.
In addition to examining our major goals, we also examined two
other issues in the present studies. First, although age
differences,
particularly in this restricted age range, were not a primary
focus
of our study, we examined whether age was associated with
increases in the elaboration of factual or interpretive
information,
given other findings on autobiographical memory development
during this age period. Second, by late adolescence and beyond,
people also have the capacity to engage in deliberate, strategic
self-presentation (e.g., Baumeister, Stilman, & Wotman, 1990;
Tice, 1992). Such deliberate self-presentation would suggest
that
people strategically change their stories, and strategic changes
in
narration imply a different type of identity-related implication
than
do changes in narrative identity construction that occur without
a

great deal of self-awareness on the part of the individual.
Study 1
Study 1 provides a first examination of how late adolescents
and
young adults construct narrative identity around positive experi-
ences, in collaboration with listeners who vary in their
responsive-
ness. We expected that late adolescents and emergent adults
talk-
ing with distracted friends would construct less elaborated
stories
560 PASUPATHI AND HOYT
in general but would be especially likely to construct less inter-
pretive accounts.
Method
Participants
Participants were 40 same-gender pairs of friends (50% men,
50% women) recruited from the introductory psychology subject
pool at the University of Utah. To recruit pairs of friends, we
first
recruited target participants (assigned to the speaker role), and
these participants were asked to bring a close, same-gender
friend
to the experiment. The average age of speakers was 21.6 years
(SD � 3.2). Participating friends had known each other an
average
of 3.2 years (SD � 3.8).1 The majority of participants were

European American (90%). Pairs were randomly assigned to an
attentive or distracted listener condition; conditions did not
differ
in the length of time friends had known one another or in
ratings
of friendship quality. Equipment failure caused loss of
transcripts
in two cases. Sample sizes for analyses reported below vary
accordingly.
Procedure
After arriving, participants completed several measures, includ-
ing personality, relationship quality, and background measures.
Speakers identified recent undisclosed events they considered to
be positive, selected one event to describe to the friend, and
provided some preliminary ratings of the events. Meanwhile,
friends were separated from speakers for instruction. Attentive
friends were told, “Listen to your friend the way you typically
do
when you’re being a good listener.” Distracted friends were
told,
“We are interested in how conversations go when one person is
distracted.” They were asked to count all words beginning with
the
letters th while listening to the speaker and practiced this task
on
10 prepared stories read aloud by the experimenter, who
provided
feedback about task accuracy after each story. Listeners were
offered an incentive of $5 if they were accurate in counting
words
beginning with th, with accuracy defined as coming within a
4-point margin of error during the subsequent conversation with
the speaker. This target was chosen on the basis of listener per-
formance in the training session, because listeners were rarely

especially accurate but achieved this standard of performance at
a
rate of about 50% of the time. Pilot work revealed that
participants
proved to have difficulty ignoring their friend’s storytelling in
favor of the th task, and the incentive improved their level of
distraction. The dyad was then reunited and videotaped while
the
speaker described the chosen experience to the listener.
Following
the conversation, the speaker completed additional ratings of
lis-
tener responsiveness and agreeableness, and rated the extent to
which the story was detailed and coherently told. Participants
were
fully debriefed and given information about both listener condi-
tions, and were told about our interest in how listeners
influence
storytelling.
Measures
Manipulation check. As a manipulation check, we obtained
speaker ratings of the extent to which the listener agreed with
his
or her version of events (a single item) and of the listener’s
responsiveness (an average across five items, including, for
exam-
ple, “The listener was very responsive”; Cronbach’s � � .84).
Agreement and responsiveness often covary, but they are
concep-
tually distinct (e.g., Pasupathi, Carstensen, Levenson, &
Gottman,
1999). Both were assessed because manipulations of listener re-
sponsiveness sometimes influence both.

Speaker’s perceptions of story quality. To assess deliberate
changes in storytelling, we obtained speakers’ ratings of the
qual-
ity of the story they told across nine items, using 7-point Likert-
type scales in which 1 indicated lower quality and 7 higher
quality.
Example items include “My story used few details/many
details”
and “My story was very incoherent/very coherent.” These nine
items were averaged to create a single index of story quality
(Cronbach’s � � .90).
Coding of conversational data. Each recorded conversation
was transcribed by undergraduate research assistants.
Transcripts
were then divided into “idea units” that roughly corresponded to
verb phrases. Idea units were then coded according to their con-
tent. We examined two main types of narrative content. The
first
main category was event factual information, that is,
information
available to the perceptual capabilities of any bystander.
Examples
of this category include such as statements “Mom and I had a
talk
while you were gone,” “We talked for almost two hours,” and
“She
started crying and everything.” The second category was
interpre-
tive information, or information that emphasizes the subjective,
meaning-laden, and internal aspects of experience—in short,
nar-
rative identity. Examples of this category include “It was just a
good talk,” “She’s always sappy like that,” “We have become
closer and everything,” and “It makes it feel like things have

really
changed since I left for school.” Additional categories included
statements aimed at regulating the conversation (establishing
un-
derstanding, providing minimal back channels, etc.), off-topic
statements (references to the experimental setting), and
uncodable
statements. The Appendix presents an entire conversation, in
units
and coded.
To establish reliability between coders, the two authors first
independently coded several conversations. These independently
coded sets were then compared by means of Cohen’s kappa.
Once
the authors established substantial independent agreement (� �
.91) and resolved remaining discrepancies through discussion,
the
second author then trained a team of two additional
undergraduate
coders. After learning the coding scheme, the coding team
applied
the coding scheme to the 38 conversations in the study. The
coding
team held weekly meetings in which problematic coding units
were discussed and agreement on content was sought. Fifteen
percent of the conversation pairs were coded independently by
two
coders to quantify reliability across the full set of content
catego-
ries in the coding scheme. Across 373 idea units, coders agreed
77% of the time on the content category (� � .68). For each
pair,
we computed the number of speaker-generated facts and evalua-
tions. These content code variables served as the primary
depen-

dent measures for our analyses.
1 The length of time partners had known one another was
unrelated to
any of the results reported here; nor did relationship quality
have any
impact on any of the findings.
Results
Manipulation Check
A general linear model examining the effects of experimental
condition and gender on perceived listener attentiveness and
agree-
ableness revealed only an overall effect of condition, F(2, 37) �
26.8, p � .01, �p
2 � .59. Univariate tests showed that condition
effects were evident for perceptions of listener attentiveness,
F(1,
38) � 6.3, p � .02, �p
2 � .14, and for perceptions of listener
agreeableness, F(1, 38) � 54.9, p � .01, �p
2 � .59. Speakers
perceived distracted listeners to be less responsive (attentive: M
�
5.4, SD � 1.0; distracted: M � 3.1, SD � 1.0) and less
agreeable
(attentive: M � 6.1, SD � 1.4; distracted: M � 4.9, SD � 1.7).

Impact of Listener Responsiveness on Amount and Type
of Information Recalled
We expected that when faced with distracted listeners, our
partic-
ipants would construct shorter stories in general, and especially
for
interpretive, as opposed to factual, content. To test this
hypothesis, we
computed a general linear model (multivariate analysis of
variance)
with the number of speaker-generated facts and evaluations as
depen-
dent variables, listener condition and gender as between-
subjects
variables, and type of information (facts or evaluations) as a
within-
subjects variable. The results revealed significant main effects
of
condition, F(1, 34) � 5.2, p � .03, �p
2 � .13, and type of information,
F(1, 34) � 6.0, p � .01, �p
2 � .15. We also computed simple effects
tests examining the effect of listener condition within each type
of
information separately. These contrasts revealed that distracted
listen-
ers elicited significantly fewer facts, F(1, 34) � 5.2, p � .03,
�p
2 �
.14, and tended to elicit fewer interpretations, F(1, 34) � 2.9, p
� .10,

�p
2 � .08 (see Table 1). These effects are shown in Figure 1. As
seen
here, factual information predominated. Distracted listeners
elicit less
information overall, and given the absence of a significant
interaction
between information type and listener condition, the
information
decrement appears consistent across information type, contrary
to our
hypotheses.
Are Speakers Aware of the Impact of Listeners
on Their Stories?
To evaluate whether participants were aware of the impact of
listeners on their stories, we computed an analysis of variance
examining perceived story quality as a function of listener
condi-
tion and gender. There were no differences in self-reported
story
quality as a function of listener condition, F(1, 36) � 1, ps �
.40
(attentive: M � 3.8, SD � 1.4; distracted: M � 3.8, SD � 1.0).
There were also no significant effects involving gender.
Cross-Sectional Age Differences in Story Content
To examine age differences in the content of participants’ sto-
ries, we computed a partial correlation between age and factual
and
interpretive units, controlling for the perceived attentiveness of
listeners. Older participants tended to report more facts than
younger participants, r(35) � .31, p � .07, but they did not

differ
significantly in their inclusion of interpretive information, r(35)
�
.18, p � .20. These correlations are not significantly different
from
each other, however, and with greater power both types of
infor-
mation may in fact increase with age.
Study 2
The results of Study 1 suggested that (a) late adolescents and
emergent adults constructed less rich and elaborated stories
when
they spoke to distracted friends; (b) these same participants’
rat-
ings of their own stories did not differ as a function of their
friends’ behavior; and (c) across even this restricted age range
and
with limited power, there were possible age differences in the
elaboration of factual information in conversational narration.
Our initial expectation, that distracted listeners would be
especially
problematic in relation to interpretive content, was not
confirmed.
However, we had relatively little statistical power given our
small
sample size and, in particular, given that the stories told in this
study
had more factual than interpretive content. Further, we had
examined
only positive events in this study, whereas earlier work on
narrative
identity emphasized the potential for negative events to involve
self-

construction in childhood and, to some extent, in adulthood
(Bird &
Reese, 2006; Thorne et al., 2004). Thus, in Study 2, we
expanded our
focus to examine both positive and negative events. Participant
pairs
were randomly assigned to a positive or negative event
condition.
Moreover, the addition of a negative event condition also
increased
our statistical power for examining age differences. Aside from
this
change, Study 2 was an exact replication of Study 1.
Method
Participants
Participants in this study were 81 same-gender friend dyads
(50% men, 50% women) recruited from the introductory
psychol-
ogy subject pool and through flyers posted at the University of
Utah. The average age of speakers was 19.6 years (SD � 1.9),
again, firmly within the age range of late adolescence and early
adulthood. Within dyads, participants had known each other an
average of 4.7 years (SD � 6.0).2 One pair was excluded
because
the speaker was not a native speaker of English, leaving a total
sample of 80 pairs. The sample predominantly comprised Euro-
pean American participants (76.5%), with Hispanic participants
composing an additional 12.3% of the sample. Participants were
randomly assigned to one of two event-valence conditions (posi-
tive or negative) and to one of two listener conditions (attentive
or
distracted). As in Study 1, there were no differences by
condition

in the length of time participants had known one another or in
their
ratings of relationship quality.
2 The length of time that partners had known one another and
ratings of the
quality of their relationship did not influence the results
presented below.
Table 1
Means and Standard Deviations of Dependent Measures in
Study 1
Measure
Attentive Distracted
M SD M SD
Facts 40.1 31.6 21.0 15.0
Evaluations 29.1 23.8 17.7 15.1
Procedure
The procedure was identical to that in Study 1, except that half
the participants assigned to the speaker role were asked to
identify
recent, undisclosed negative events, and the other half were
asked
to identify recent, undisclosed positive events.
Measures

Manipulation check. Speakers rated their perceptions of the
listeners’ responsiveness across the same five items used in
Study
1 (Cronbach’s � � .83) and rated their perception of the
listeners’
agreement with their views on a 7-point Likert-type scale,
again, as
in Study 1.
Speaker’s perceptions of story quality. Speakers rated their
perceptions of story quality along the same nine items employed
in
Study 1, and we averaged the items to create an index of
perceived
story quality. The internal consistency of this measure was
lower
in this study than in Study 1 (Cronbach’s � � .68).
Coding of conversations. Coding employed the same system
as in Study 1. Twenty-five percent (n � 20) of the conversation
pairs were coded independently to quantify reliability; coders
agreed on about 82% of 1,169 idea units (� � .75). As in Study
1,
we computed the number of speaker-generated event facts and
evaluations as primary dependent measures.
Results
Manipulation Check
A general linear model testing for effects of listener condition
(attentive vs. distracted), event valence (positive or negative),
and
gender on the speaker’s perceptions of the agreeableness and

responsiveness of the listener revealed a main effect of listener
condition, F(2, 72) � 21.4, p � .01, �p
2 � .37, and a main effect
of gender, F(2, 72) � 4.3, p � .02, �p
2 � .11. Examination of the
univariate effects for these two main effects suggested that
listener
condition influenced perceptions of listener responsiveness,
F(1,
73) � 42.9, p � .01, �p
2 � .37, but not perceptions of listener
agreement, F(1, 73) � 1.2, p � .20. As expected, listeners in the
distracted condition were perceived as less responsive (M �
3.6,
SD � 1.2) than listeners in the responsive condition (M � 5.3,
SD � 1.2). Gender was also related to perceptions of listener
responsiveness, F(1, 73) � 4.8, p � .05, �p
2 � .06, but not to
perceptions of listener agreement, F(1, 73) � 1.8, p � .15.
Across
conditions, women rated their listeners (who were also women)
as
more attentive (M � 4.7, SD � 1.6) than did men (M � 4.2, SD
�
1.3). Our manipulation of listener behavior was successful, as
perceived by the speakers, but had a more narrowly focused
impact
on responsiveness than in Study 1. Note that even testing for
effects of listener condition on agreeableness within the
positive
event condition did not result in perceptions that listeners
differed

in agreeableness. Differences in attentiveness by gender did not
interact with the manipulation.
Do Speakers Change Their Story Depending on
Listener Condition and Event Valence?
We conducted a general linear model with information type
(factual, interpretive) as a within-subjects factor and gender,
lis-
tener condition, and event valence as between-subjects factors.
There were main effects of type of information, F(1, 72) � 4.4,
p � .05, �p
2 � .06, and gender, F(1, 72) � 4.0, p � .05, �p
2 � .05,
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45

50
snoitaterpretnIstcaF
Type of Information
N
um
be
r
of
Id
ea
U
ni
ts
Attentive
Distracted
Figure 1. Effect of distracted versus attentive friends on
information during conversational remembering in
Study 1. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.
and a trend toward a main effect of listener condition, F(1, 72)
�
3.8, p � .06, �p

2 � .05. In addition, there was an interaction of
listener condition and type of information, F(1, 72) � 5.6, p �
.03,
�p
2 � .07.
In contrast to the results of Study 1, conversations focused more
on interpretive information (M � 33.8, SD � 48.8) than on facts
(M � 23.9, SD � 23.4), and women produced a greater number
of
units on average, across all types of information (M � 71.6, SD
�
85.1) than did men (M � 43.1, SD � 23.2), which is consistent
with the fact that women in this study rated their listeners as
more
attentive than did men across all conditions. Attentive friends
tended to elicit longer accounts (M � 72.0, SD � 85.2) than did
distracted listeners (M � 43.4, SD � 26.4), but this effect was
qualified by an interaction with information type. To follow up
the
interaction effect, we tested the simple effect of listener
condition
within each type of information. Only one of these simple
effects
tests was significant: that for interpretive information, F(1, 72)
�
5.3, p � .03, �p
2 � .07. Participants told attentive friends nearly
twice as many interpretive units (M � 45.7, SD � 64.9) than
they
told to distracted listeners (M � 21.1, SD � 16.9). Figure 2
displays the amount of information contained in participants’
stories as a function of information type and listener condition.
Thus, there were no significant effects of listeners on factual

content and no effects of valence on memory content. See Table
2.
Are Speakers Aware of the Impact of Listeners
on Their Stories?
As in Study 1, we examined whether speakers’ perception of the
quality of their story differed significantly as a function of
listener
condition, event valence, or gender. There were no significant
main effects or interactions, and speakers in the two listener
conditions rated their stories quite similarly (attentive: M �
4.3,
SD � 1.3; distracted: M � 4.0, SD � 1.0).
As in Study 1, we computed a partial correlation between age
and factual and interpretive information scores, controlling for
perceptions of listener attentiveness and this time, based on the
results above, for gender. Age was again significantly and posi-
tively correlated with the inclusion of factual information, r(76)
�
.23, p � .05, and was not significantly correlated with the inclu-
sion of interpretive information, r(76) � �.04, p � .50.
To summarize, the results of Study 2 showed that (a) late
adolescents and emergent adults told significantly less
interpretive
stories to distracted friends than to attentive friends, across both
positive and negative events; (b) these same participants were
not
aware of the changes in the stories they told; and (c) once again,
older participants, compared with younger participants, told
stories

that involved more factual content. We also observed main
effects
of gender on both perceptions of listener responsiveness and the
overall length of stories. These main effects were quite
congruent:
Women in this study perceived their listeners as more
responsive
and produced longer stories.
In contrast to the results of Study 1, participants did not reduce
the factual content of their stories when talking to distracted
friends. Notably, distracted friends in this study were perceived
as
less responsive but as equally agreeable. It is possible that when
people perceive their listener to disagree, they repeat and
otherwise
emphasize interpretive content to persuade or convince listeners
to
accept their perspective. Thus, in Study 1, listeners’
unresponsive-
ness and disagreeableness may have had opposing effects on
interpretive information, diminishing the impact of
responsiveness
0
10
20
30
40
50

60
snoitaterpretnIstcaF
Type of Information
N
um
be
r
of
Id
ea
U
ni
ts
Attentive
Distracted
Figure 2. Effect of distracted versus attentive friends on
information during conversational remembering in
Study 2. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean.
on this type of information. Notably, earlier work on film clips,
in
which participants perceived a listening stranger as both
distracted

and disagreeable, obtained findings similar to those of Study 1
(Pasupathi et al., 1998)—significant decrements in both factual
and interpretive information.
Work on children’s personal storytelling typically examines
naturally occurring variability in maternal responsiveness and
elaborativeness; elaborative mothers usually combine warm,
sup-
portive, and generally agreeable attitudes with high levels of
attentiveness to the child’s story. Listening in adulthood
likewise
combines responsiveness with warmth and agreeableness under
most circumstances but not all (see, e.g., Pasupathi et al.,
1999).
Ideally, the ability to disentangle responsiveness and agreement
experimentally would permit us to explore more directly the im-
plications of responsiveness, as distinct from agreement, for the
types of information participants include when constructing a
personal story in conversations. Study 3 was designed to
attempt to
disentangle the implications of agreement from listeners and re-
sponsiveness from listeners for the construction of narrative
iden-
tity and to do so in an experimentally controlled manner. This
disentangling was motivated by the desire to reconcile the con-
flicting findings from Study 1 and Study 2. In addition,
however,
responsiveness combined with disagreement may have some of
its
own particular developmental implications, perhaps especially
in
the context of the dynamics of individuation that are so
important
for adolescents and young adults. Thus, although the primary
purpose of our project was to examine variations in listener re-
sponsiveness, variations in listener agreement with the speaker

may be relevant for the development of narrative identity in a
distinctive way, and Study 3 also provides preliminary evidence
of
that.
Study 3
The major task in Study 3 was to find a way to examine how
unresponsive and disagreeable listening differentially influence
the
construction of identity in conversational narratives. One way to
approach this was to borrow from experimental social
psychology
and to create an experience in our laboratory that permitted
some
conversational narration and that was at least potentially
relevant
to narrative identity construction but also somewhat
standardized
across participants. We did this by asking participants to try a
computer game called Sims (Electronic Arts, Redwood City,
CA)
for the first time. First-time activities, though not of great
impor-
tance in an individual’s life, offer opportunities for thinking
about
new aspects of one’s identity and for construing novel situations
in
terms of enduring identities.
The Sims game was also ideal for our purposes because it
entails
being a simulated individual. Players must “live” in the game by
taking care of basic needs such as eating, bathing, and toileting,
as
well as more elaborate needs for income via work, social

interac-
tion, and self-enhancement. Needs, indicated via bars on the
screen, are addressed by choosing to take particular actions
(e.g.,
clean the apartment, call a friend). Unpredictable, random
events
such as fires, burglaries, and loss of a job occur and must be
dealt
with by the player. The game has relatively high appeal for
women, in contrast to many computer games, and permits some
degree of identity investment on the part of players.
Participants all played the game for the first time, and were then
asked to talk about this experience with a same-gender friend,
following procedures similar to those employed in Studies 1 and
2.
However, because pilot work showed that such conversations
nearly always revolved around evaluating whether the game was
fun, we were able to create a condition in which listeners could
disagree with speakers’ views of the game. This was done by
asking players to evaluate the game just after playing. The
players’
evaluation was then employed to instruct their friends to
convince
them of the opposite view: If players thought the game was fun,
as
most participants did, then friends were asked to express the
view
that the game was boring.
This procedure raised three methodological issues. First, are
descriptions of playing a computer game for the first time
analo-
gous to stories about real personal experiences? Second, in
those
descriptions, how does one address information about how the

game is played, which is neither factual nor, in the usual sense
of
our coding scheme, interpretive? And third, does disagreement
about the evaluation of the game change the storytelling task to
one involving persuasion in ways that would undermine compar-
isons with the previous two studies?
With respect to the first issue, first-time experiences with an
activity, of which the present experiment can be seen as an
example, are in fact among the personal experiences that we
frequently disclose to others. Recently collected data in our
labo-
ratory showed that of 59 people asked to report on a recent
(within
the last 2 weeks) novel experience, 53 had already told others
about that event, and across different types of events (self-
discrepant, self-typical, repeated, and novel), novel events were
the most likely to have been disclosed to others. So storytelling
about new experiences is an ecologically valid subcategory of
the
more general category of personal storytelling. Moreover, it is
likely that storytelling about first-time experiences is a very im-
portant aspect of the construction of narrative identity, in the
sense
that such storytelling may revolve around the potential role that
the
Table 2
Study 2
Measure
Attentive Distracted
Positive events Negative events Positive events Negative events

M SD M SD M SD M SD
Facts 26.3 23.0 24.8 26.0 20.5 19.2 24.2 14.1
Evaluations 44.0 52.6 49.0 76.5 22.6 17.3 19.5 16.8
new experience or activity may or may not play in a person’s
life
(see Thoman et al., 2007).
To address the second issue, we expanded our coding scheme to
include a category called schematic inferences. This category
included idea units that referred to information about how the
game could be played, such as the rules, goals, and
opportunities
within the game. Examples of this category included such state-
ments as “You gotta spend all this time beefing up your dude,”
“You’re just watching her go through her daily routine,” and
“You
have to make friends.” Such information was not, strictly
speaking,
factual in the sense of reporting on what happened during game
play. Like interpretive information, it required inferences based
on
the participants’ experience, but unlike interpretive information,
those inferences were about how to succeed at the game, rather
than about the broader category of interpretations related to the
participants’ experiences and evaluations. As a consequence, we
were able to examine how variations in listener behavior influ-
enced three types of information: factual details about events
that
occurred during the participants’ game experience, schematic

in-
ferences about how the game works, and interpretive
information
about the overall game experience, including the extent to
which
the game was fun or interesting to play. Note that schematic
information is also an aspect of personal remembering that has
been extensively examined in early childhood, and when young
children narrate novel experiences, they often focus extensively
on
this type of information (e.g., P. J. Bauer, 2006). Thus, this
addition also permitted Study 3 to explore the construction of
schematic knowledge in the context of responsive and unrespon-
sive listening in a sample of early adults.
The third issue, which is whether disagreement about the eval-
uation of the game changes a storytelling task to a persuasion
task,
is crucial. However, most remembering to friends or family re-
volves around making some type of interpretive claim and
backing
it up with selected facts (Hyman, 1994). In other words, the
storytelling in Studies 1 and 2 also reflected attempts to tell a
story
that made one or another point, but the specific points at stake
were
heterogeneous given the varied events participants chose.
Method
Participants
Participants in this study were 104 same-gender friend dyads
(49% men, 51% women) recruited from the introductory
psychol-
ogy subject pool at the University of Utah. The average age of

speakers was 20.8 years (SD � 3.4), again, consistent with the
targeted age range. Within dyads, participants had known one
another an average of 4.6 years (SD � 5.5).3 This sample
predom-
inantly comprised European American participants (88.5%).
Par-
ticipants were randomly assigned to one of five conditions:
atten-
tive agreeable (n � 20), attentive disagreeable (n � 22),
distracted
(n � 21), distracted agreeable (n � 22), and distracted disagree-
able (n � 20). On the basis of initial analyses of our
manipulation
check measures, we collapsed these categories into attentive–
agreeable (n � 20), attentive– disagreeable (n � 22), and dis-
tracted (n � 63) conditions.
Procedure
Upon arrival, participants were assigned to speaker and listener
roles. As in previous studies, the pairs were separated to
complete
background measures not included in the present study. In
contrast
to what participants did in previous studies, rather than generate
a
list of recent experiences, speakers played the Sims game for 15
min. The experimenter first explained the video game and pro-
vided brief instructions. All participants began the game at an
identical starting condition, in terms of simulated money, skills,
and status; women played a female character and men a male
character. After playing the game, participants completed ques-
tionnaires assessing interest in the game.
During this game play time, listeners were given separate in-

structions. Agreeable and attentive friends and distracted
listeners
were given instructions as in Studies 1 and 2. Disagreeable and
attentive friends were told that the speaker liked or disliked the
game, according to the speaker’s ratings of the game postplay,
and
were asked to convince the speaker of the opposite evaluation.
Distracted–agreeable and distracted– disagreeable listeners were
asked to practice either mild confirmatory responses (e.g.,
“yeah”)
or mild disconfirming responses (e.g., “hmm”) while engaging
in
the same practice of counting th words as the distracted
listeners.
Measures
Manipulation check. As in Studies 1 and 2, speakers rated
listeners’ responsiveness along the same 7-point Likert-type
items
indexing indicators of listener responsiveness (Cronbach’s � �
.82). Because agreement from listeners was being manipulated
in
this study, we added two items assessing listener concordance
(“Your friend supported your opinion of Sims” and “Your friend
agreed with your view of Sims”), again rated on 7-point Likert-
type scales in which low ratings indicated no concordance and
high ratings indicated higher concordance. These items were av-
eraged to provide a measure of perceived listener concordance
(Cronbach’s � � .84).
Speaker’s perceptions of story quality. The same nine items
used in Studies 1 and 2 were averaged to create an assessment
of
overall story quality (Cronbach’s � � .87).

Coding of transcripts. Each transcription of a conversation
was transcribed and divided into idea units by undergraduate
research assistants. These idea units were coded for content
through the same coding scheme used in Studies 1 and 2, with
the
addition of the schematic inference category. Weekly meetings
were held in which problematic coding units were discussed and
agreement on content was sought. Twenty percent of the conver-
sation pairs (n � 20) were coded independently to quantify reli-
ability. Intercoder reliability for Study 3 across the detailed
coding
scheme was good (83% agreement; � � .79).
Results
Manipulation Check and Preliminary Analyses
As noted, participants were assigned into three conditions: an
attentive and agreeable condition (n � 20 pairs), an attentive
but
disagreeable condition (n � 22 pairs), and a distracted condition
(n � 63 pairs). Reanalyzing the manipulation checks revealed
that
the two attentive conditions differed from the distracted
condition
3 Again, the amount of time known and the quality of the
relationships
did not affect the results presented for this study.
on attentiveness alone, that the distracted and disagreeable
condi-

tions together differed from the attentive–agreeable condition
on
agreement alone. In other words, the distracted condition in this
study, as in Study 1, is better described as a distracted–
disagreeable condition. Although the full disentangling of
agree-
ableness and attentiveness that we attempted was not achieved,
the
present study did succeed in providing a partial disentangling of
agreement and attentiveness. Specifically, the disagreeable
condi-
tion combined disagreement with high responsiveness, whereas
the
distracted condition reflected perceptions of disagreement with
low responsiveness. The attentive and agreeable condition
resulted
in listeners perceived as highly responsive and highly agreeable.
Do Speakers Change Their Story Depending on Listener
Behavior?
We conducted a general linear model with information type
(factual, game schematic, and interpretive) as a within-subjects
factor and listener condition (attentive–agreeable, attentive–
disagreeable, and distracted) and gender as between-subjects
fac-
tors. The results suggested a significant main effect of
condition,
F(2, 90) � 8.4, p � .01, �p
2 � .16, as well as interactions involving
listener condition and type of information, F(4, 180) � 5.7, p �
.01, �p
2 � .11, and listener condition, type of information, and
gender, F(4, 180) � 2.8, p � .03, �p

2 � .06.
The main effect of listener condition was reflected by the fact
that across all types of information, participants constructed
stories
with more information of all types when they had an attentive–
agreeable (M � 31.3, SEM � 3.6) or attentive– disagreeable (M
�
31.0, SEM � 3.6) listener, in contrast to stories constructed for
a
distracted– disagreeable friend (M � 17.7, SEM � 2.1). The
two
attentive conditions did not differ from each other. The Condi-
tion � Type of Information interaction, however, suggested that
this difference was not consistent across the different types of
information.
Post hoc comparisons examining the effect of listener condition
separately for each type of information suggested that listener
condition significantly affected all three types of information,
3.4 � F(2, 90) � 13.5, ps � .05, �p
2 � .07. For facts about the
game, participants constructed more elaborated stories for
attentive–agreeable friends (M � 45.1, SEM � 6.9), compared
with attentive– disagreeable friends (M � 22.3, SEM � 6.9) and
distracted– disagreeable friends (M � 26.5, SEM � 4.0), who
had
similar effects. Differences between the attentive–agreeable
con-
dition and the other two conditions were marginally significant
( ps � .07) based on pairwise comparisons.
For schematic inferences about the game, participants con-
structed stories with more schematic inferences for attentive–

disagreeable listeners (M � 35.7, SEM � 3.8), followed by
attentive–agreeable listeners (M � 23.9, SEM � 3.8) and
distracted– disagreeable listeners (M � 14.8, SEM � 2.2).
Pairwise
comparisons showed that the difference between the attentive–
disagreeable and distracted– disagreeable condition was
significant
( p � .01), whereas the difference between the attentive–
agreeable
and attentive– disagreeable condition was marginal ( p � .09),
and
the difference between the attentive–agreeable and distracted–
disagreeable condition was not significant ( p � .12).
Interpretive information followed a highly similar pattern, with
attentive– disagreeable listeners eliciting the highest number of
such statements (M � 34.5, SEM � 4.0), followed by attentive–
agreeable listeners (M � 25.1, SEM � 4.0) and distracted
listeners
(M � 11.8, SEM � 2.3). In this case, pairwise comparisons
showed no significant differences between the attentive–
agreeable
and attentive– disagreeable conditions ( p � .27), but the
distracted
condition differed significantly from both of the other
conditions
( ps � .02).
Finally, to explore the three-way interaction with gender, we
again examined the effect of listener condition separately for
each
type of information, but this time we also did this separately for
men and women. The resulting contrasts showed effects of con-
dition on schematic information for men, F(2, 90) � 3.8, p �
.03,

�p
2 � .08, and women, F(2, 90) � 8.6, p � .01, �p
2 � .16, and on
interpretive information for both men, F(2, 90) � 5.2, p � .01,
�p
2
� .10, and women, F(2, 90) � 10.3, p � .01, �p
2 � .19. However,
for factual information, whereas listener condition had a signifi-
cant impact on men, F(2, 90) � 5.1, p � .01, �p
2 � .10, there was
no comparable effect for women, F(2, 90) � 1. Pairwise
compar-
isons of men and women across all other cells of the design
revealed one marginal difference and one significant difference
between men and women. Both differences were evident in the
attentive condition. Men in the attentive condition tended to
pro-
duce more factual accounts than women ( p � .07) and produced
significantly less interpretive accounts ( p � .02). This
difference
in the baseline, in which women produced relatively nonfactual
accounts, is the likely reason that listener condition did not sig-
nificantly influence factual content for women. These results
are
shown in Figure 3. Table 3 presents means and standard
deviations
for all types of information by gender and listener condition.
Are Speakers Aware of the Impact of Listeners on Their
Stories?

As in Study 1, speakers rated their stories along the same
indicators. An analysis of variance of overall story quality as a
function of gender and listener condition revealed no significant
differences in perceived story quality as a function of listener
condition, F(2, 96) � 2.6, p � .08, �p
2 � .05. There were also no
effects involving gender. Notably, this effect is a trend.
Examina-
tion of the estimated marginal means suggests that the overall
trend is due to the fact that stories told to attentive and
agreeable
listeners were rated more highly (M � 4.4, SEM � 0.2) than
stories told to distracted listeners (M � 3.8, SEM � 0.1). Exam-
ining the items that make up the composite story quality rating
suggested that only a single item was rated differently by
partic-
ipants with distracted listeners. Specifically, stories told to
distracted– disagreeable listeners were rated as significantly
less
emotional than stories told to attentive–agreeable listeners, al-
though not differently from stories told to attentive–
disagreeable
friends. In sum, as in Studies 1 and 2, participants did not
report
awareness of telling different stories to friends whose listening
behavior differed.
As in Studies 1 and 2, we computed a partial correlation be-
tween age and factual, interpretive, and schematic units,
control-
ling for perceptions of listener attentiveness and gender based
on

the analyses above. Again, age was positively and significantly
correlated with factual content, r(92) � .30, p � .05, but not
with
interpretive content, r(92) � .03, p � .70, or schematic content,
r(92) � �.07, p � .40.
General Discussion
The present studies demonstrate that the development of narra-
tive identity during late adolescence and early adulthood, in the
microcontext of conversational storytelling, is shaped by the re-
sponsiveness, and perhaps the agreeableness, of listening
friends.
Specifically, by early adulthood, responsive listening is critical
for
the inclusion of interpretive information in storytelling. Given
that
interpretive information is important for long-term effects on
self
and identity assessed in a variety of ways (Bird & Reese, 2006;
McLean & Pratt, 2006; Pasupathi, 2007), the findings both
confirm
the role of relationships in identity development and point to a
process by which relationships influence identity development.
In Study 3, the effects of distracted listening were similar for
interpretive information and schematic inferences. The
literature
on the early childhood emergence of autobiographical
remember-

ing has addressed not only the emergence of self (e.g., Bird &
Reese, 2006) but also the emergence of scripts and schemas
(e.g.,
P. J. Bauer & Fivush, 1992). Conversations about a novel
activity
involve both scripts and interpretive content, and faced with un-
responsive friends, our late adolescent participants were
impaired
in both. Tentatively, this suggests that distracted listeners more
broadly suppress meanings, both those that revolve around
“what
I’m like” and those that refer to “how things get done.” Because
both of these kinds of meanings are important for
developmental
trajectories, this finding warrants further investigation across a
broader range of age groups, listeners, and activities.
The role of responsiveness on the construction of narrative
identity in the moment was distinguishable from agreement,
which
was related to whether participants constructed elaborated
factual
narratives. This has some important developmental implications
to
which we return below. Finally, these effects of listeners were
not
reducible to deliberate self-presentation, as our participants
were
0
10
20
30

40
50
60
70
80
Facts Schematic Interpretations Facts Schematic Interpretations
Males
Females
N
um
be
r
of
Id
ea
U
ni
ts
Attentive/Agreeable
Attentive/Disagreeable
Distracted
Figure 3. Effect of distracted versus attentive and attentive–

disagreeable listeners on information during
conversational remembering in Study 3. Error bars represent
standard errors of the mean.
Table 3
Study 3
Measure
Attentive Disagreeable Distracted
Men Women Men Women Men Women
M SD M SD M SD M SD M SD M SD
Facts 57.7 50.0 32.4 22.8 19.4 15.8 25.2 26.5 25.8 29.8 27.2
28.4
Schematic inferences 21.7 15.8 26.0 12.6 33.0 17.2 38.4 27.1
16.3 17.6 13.3 11.4
Evaluations 15.3 15.6 34.9 26.5 32.3 23.0 36.8 32.3 11.6 9.7
12.0 11.8
Note. Gender is included because this study revealed
differences between male and female conversations.
not aware of constructing different kinds of stories for different
listeners. Finally, consistent with the idea that this age period is
a
privileged one for autobiographical encoding and recall
(Holmes
& Conway, 1999; Rubin & Schulkind, 1997), we found consis-

tently small but reliable age-related increases in the factual
content
of memories.
Below we consider these findings in the context of their impli-
cations for narrative approaches to the development of memory
and identity (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Fivush &
Nelson,
2004; Hooker & McAdams, 2003; McLean et al., 2007;
Pasupathi,
Mansour, & Brubaker, 2007; Pasupathi & Rich, 2005). Through-
out, we discuss specific limitations in the areas where they are
relevant to our interpretations.
Developing Narrative Identity in Late Adolescence and
Early Adulthood
Despite the ubiquity of conversational remembering (e.g.,
Bohanek et al., 2006; Rimé, Finkenauer, Luminet, Zech, &
Philli-
pot, 1998), previous empirical work on narrative identity in
emer-
gent adulthood has focused primarily on written or interview-
based narratives, in which interviewers strive to avoid
influencing
speakers. Although narrative identity work clearly
acknowledges
the constructive nature of memory that has been part of
cognitive
work for decades (Bartlett, 1932/1995; Conway & Pleydell-
Pearce, 2000; Schacter, 1996), extant research emphasizes how
storytellers’ goals shape their remembering, ranging from
endur-
ing, characteristic motivations of rememberers (McAdams,
Hoff-
man, Mansfield, & Day, 1996; Moffitt & Singer, 1994; Woike,

1995; Woike, Gershkovich, Piorkowski, & Polo, 1999) to exper-
imentally induced motivations (Dudukovic, Marsh, & Tversky,
2004; McGregor & Holmes, 1999; Sanitioso, Kunda, & Fong,
1990; Tversky & Marsh, 2000). Although the existing sense of
self
or personality that a storyteller brings to narration is important
and
clearly influences subsequent remembering for adults (viz.
McLean, 2005; Pasupathi, Alderman, et al., 2007; Sutin &
Robins,
2005) and young children (Bird & Reese, 2006; Reese, Haden,
&
Fivush, 1993), the role of listeners has largely been ignored for
emergent adults.
Previous work examining conversational storytelling in this age
group has focused primarily on relationships between more
tradi-
tional self-conceptions and conversational storytelling. Those
find-
ings indicate that such stories are an important medium for the
development of self in social contexts among late adolescents
and
early adults (Pasupathi, 2006; Pasupathi, Alderman, et al., 2007;
Pasupathi & Rich, 2005; Thoman et al., 2007). The present
results
expand these findings to the interpretive aspects of
conversational
narrative and connect to work on early childhood storytelling,
memory, and self-development. Moreover, participants’
consistent
lack of awareness that their stories were changing for listeners
suggests that the effects of listeners on young adults’ stories
were
not a result of deliberate self-presentations; this is important
be-

cause social psychological work suggests that deliberate self-
presentation does not always exert influences on subsequent
self-
perceptions (e.g., see Rhodewalt, 1998, for a review).
From the childhood work, evaluative content, related to what we
have termed interpretive content, is the most important content
of
memory narratives for self-conception development (e.g., Bird
&
Reese, 2006). Interpretive aspects of remembering in early
child-
hood serve, in part, to reflect and create a sense of agency. As
children come to retain memories over longer periods, and to
think
of themselves as agents that endure across time, they begin to
construct an agent in their stories that has more long-lasting
qualities—an agent with beliefs, values, and long-term goals as
well as immediate emotions and desires (see Habermas & Bluck,
2000). From this perspective, listeners can help or hinder the
development of narrative identity in storytelling, in part by
either
supporting or constraining the agency of storytellers, regardless
of
whether the storyteller is a child or a young adult (see also
Cleveland & Reese, 2005). The experience of agency and its
extension in time, of course, change with development. But this
change is likely to be reciprocally interrelated with the process
of
narrating one’s experiences in ways that come to construct and
reflect a more enduring agency.
Agency in storytelling, however, is multilayered. It includes
both the agent within a story, who has feelings, beliefs, desires,
and identities expressed in interpretive content, and the

storyteller
him- or herself, who is giving voice to the story. The
interpretive
content of autobiographical memories is also the aspect of those
memories that is most unique and individuated. Thus, another
way
to think about distracted listening is that it silences the unique
voice of a storyteller. From this perspective, it is not only that
unresponsive listeners do not allow us to talk about what
experi-
ences mean for our self-views— how we as agents think, feel,
and
believe over time. It is that unresponsive listeners do not allow
us
to be who we are and who we are becoming, by telling stories in
ways that express and further that uniqueness.
Generally, these findings suggest continuity of developmental
processes, in that listeners were of great importance for the re-
membering of personal experiences in emergent adulthood. The
process of parent– child remembering is already known to be
critical in the development of narrative identity, memory, and
self
in early childhood (Fivush & Nelson, 2004). As children move
into
late adolescence and begin the transition to adulthood, the role
played by listeners in the development of narrative identity
may, in
fact, become more specialized. That is, in early childhood,
parents
help children learn what and how to recall about the personal
past,
and this means that parents, as listeners, are shaping both
narrative
capacity and narrative identity. Responsive, elaborative mothers
(and fathers) help children learn to tell elaborate, vivid,

detailed,
and interpretive stories about their past, and such children
develop
more advanced self-conceptions and identities in other ways as
well (Reese et al., 1993). By late adolescence, narrative
capacity is
present—all our participants were capable of telling an adequate
story about their personal experiences. However, the
responsive-
ness of listening friends continued to matter for the construction
of
stories that were richly reflective of narrative identity— of the
specific, individual experience of our participants.
Methodologically, however, and conceptually, our findings also
differ from prior work in childhood, and those differences bear
some consideration here. One issue concerns the comparability
of
distracted friends and low-elaborative mothers. In some ways,
these two groups can be conceived of as having similar effects,
in
that both groups’ behaviors may convey a lack of interest in the
construction of an elaborative, highly interpretive story. Other
work from our laboratory demonstrates relationships between
overall memory elaboration and naturally occurring variability
in
friends’ responsiveness but has not examined interpretive and
factual content separately (Liu, 2005). However, in other
respects,
these two groups are not the same. First, low-elaborative
mothers

are probably more responsive, within a storytelling interaction,
than distracted friends. Distracted friends are unresponsive on
average, to the entire story, whereas low-elaborative mothers
are
selectively responsive to specific aspects of events (often
factual in
published examples) that they construe as important but are
unre-
sponsive to other aspects in which their child may have more
interest. Thus, low-elaborative mothers may convey interest in a
preferred version of a story, whereas distracted listeners convey
no
interest. Both types of listeners may reduce the likelihood that a
person constructs an elaborate sense of narrative identity in the
moment but in somewhat distinct ways. Second, distracted
friends
in these studies were unresponsive on a single occasion but,
given
the generally established nature and high quality of these
friend-
ships, are probably more responsive on other occasions. Low-
elaborative mothers, by contrast, are seen as engaging in a
stylistic
approach to the construction of narrative identity with their
chil-
dren—an approach that has some consistency across various
rem-
iniscing occasions and over developmental time frames. This
brings up the larger issue, which is that the idea that
conversational
storytelling is a microcontext for the development of narrative
identity requires consideration of the ways in which that micro-
context is linked to more macrolevel developmental outcomes.
One possibility is that at least some people have friendships that
routinely and consistently discourage elaboration of interpretive

aspects of remembering. Although this may seem unlikely, con-
sider our gender effects in this context. In terms of storytelling
content, we observed only one gender difference: Women’s
stories
about a computer game differed from men’s, primarily in the
context of attentive friends. In that context, men’s stories were
more factual and women’s were more interpretive, possibly be-
cause of expertise in computer gaming generally, as expertise is
linked to the nature of storytelling about an event (e.g.,
Pasupathi,
Alderman, et al., 2007).
Other differences by gender, however, were more connected to
the idea of stable and consistent differences in the
responsiveness
of friends. Women also perceived their listeners as more
respon-
sive in general (Study 2) and specifically in the distracted
condi-
tion (Study 3). Further, women were more elaborative in general
(across factual and interpretive information) in Study 2,
suggesting
congruence between their perceptions and their construction of
narrative identity. Such findings are congruent with findings
about
parent– child reminiscing practices that differ between male and
female children (e.g., Fivush, 1998) and are potentially due to
real
differences in listener behavior by gender. Past work suggests
both
men and women prefer female listeners (Clark, 1994),
consistent
with the idea that women may be more responsive listeners in
general and perhaps are better able to remain somewhat
responsive
even in the face of dual task demands. This capacity, in turn,

suggests that the gender of friends may be connected to the
extent
to which those friends facilitate the construction of narrative
identity, and generates some predictions about the prevalence of
friendships with women and the construction of narrative
identity
in this age range.
Further, thinking about gender effects in this way suggests the
potential importance of looking at continuity and discontinuity
in
the kinds of listening done by good friends and the kinds of
parent– child reminiscing practices that characterized
someone’s
early childhood, as well as the parent– child reminiscing
practices
that characterize their current experience. Recent qualitative
work
(Weeks & Pasupathi, in press) suggests that at least in some
cases,
there may be interesting continuities between problematic
parent–
child reminiscing and problematic friend–friend reminiscing in
late adolescence, continuities broadly consistent with
attachment
perspectives on development (Hesse, 1999).
In addition to the possibility of some friendships entailing
consistently low elaboration, there is also the almost certain
like-
lihood that friends do engage in unresponsive listening with one
another periodically and that there are systematic features of
that
unresponsive listening. Although in the context of high-quality
relationships like those we examined here, friends are seldom

unresponsive across the board, they are certainly unresponsive
some of the time and to particular kinds of content over time. In
the
long run, repeated unresponsiveness likely serves to silence a
particular aspect of identity within that specific relationship
con-
text, and perhaps to silence that aspect of identity more broadly,
depending on the nature of that relationship for the person in-
volved. This set of implications is more consistent with the be-
havior of low-elaborative mothers, who are in some sense
shaping
a conversational story toward a particular, mother-driven form.
This kind of selective unresponsiveness can vary in its impact
on
young adults, from simply making it more difficult to express
and
explore, in reflection, one’s interest in particular experiences or
activities, as in the case of unpopular majors or hobbies, to a
real
experience of silencing, as in the case of minority sexual
identities.
The extent of the impact will also depend on the individual’s
motivation and capacity to seek out alternative social
relationships
within which particular identities can be elaborated, reflected
upon, and thus further developed—and indeed, on the very
avail-
ability of alternative relationships.
Factual Information: Development and Disagreement
The disagreeableness of listeners tended to suppress factual
content in remembering, and across all three of our studies,
older
participants consistently included more facts in their stories.
The

latter finding is consistent with the idea that memory
development
continues even into early adulthood (P. J. Bauer, 2006; Holmes
&
Conway, 1999; Rubin & Schulkind, 1997). Additionally, it is
broadly consistent with developments in knowledge about life
(e.g., Glueck & Baltes, 2006; Pasupathi, Staudinger, & Baltes,
2001) and in memory for news events, music, and other happen-
ings (e.g., Holmes & Conway, 1999) across this same age range.
This finding clearly suggests the potential for future work,
espe-
cially in looking at a broader age range and at more particular
types of information.
Factual information was suppressed in the context of disagree-
able listening for both men and women in Study 1, for men in
Study 3, and in past work (Pasupathi et al., 1998). Though
tenta-
tive, the suppression of factual information in disagreeable dis-
course is worth noting, because factual information can ground
interpretive information, and interpretations or evaluations
without
sufficient factual basis may be tenuously held, vulnerable to
vari-
ability over time or even simply not truly reflective of a
person’s
mental representation. This is the assumption behind the Adult
Attachment Interview, that broad statements about a “good
mother” are not plausible without being grounded in factual
details
(Hesse, 1999). Although interpretive information was our major

focus, the facts of our lives also have developmental import.
Further, it is worth noting that disagreement combined with re-
sponsiveness can facilitate narrative identity development very
well—a fact consistent with the earlier work of researchers
inter-
ested in autonomy and identity development (Cooper &
Grotevant,
1985) and an important reminder that responsiveness is not syn-
onymous with positivity or agreeableness.
Taken together, these studies demonstrate that the development
of
narrative identity during late adolescence and early adulthood,
at a
microlevel, is fundamentally intertwined with the extent to
which
listeners are responsive and encourage elaboration. Further
work that
attempts to examine the processes by which identity develops
needs to
take into consideration the context of conversational
storytelling and,
within that context, the collaboration of listeners. From
childhood
through adulthood, responsive listeners are critical for allowing
each
of us to express and further our own unique voice.
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(Appendix follows)

Appendix
Sample Transcript With Coding
Example: Pair 29 Content
S: All right, well my experience was a couple days ago 1
we ran out of toilet paper. And 2
Mary was like, okay, 2
I’ll go get toilet paper, because 2
it’s her turn, right? 3
Yeah. 1
Ten minutes later, she’s like, hey Eileen, 2
can you get some toilet paper? 2
I was so mad. 3
Yeah, like, yesterday all day long she’s like, 2
I don’t have anything to do all day. 2
I’m like, why don’t you go get some toilet paper because 2
we’re out of toilet paper. 2
She’s like, no, 2
I just want to sit here and 2
play on the Internet. 2
L: Oh. 1
S: So mad. 3
Finally today I went and got it. 2
(inaudible) 9
I was like, napkins are good. 2
L: That’s smart. 3
S: Well, then there’s the part where 3
I’m the younger 3
(inaudible), 9
supposedly, because she’s twenty-six. 3
L: Oh. 1

S: And she’s like, no, 2
I don’t want to. 2
Being lazy. 3
She’s like, I’ll pay you back. 2
I’m like, Smith’s is two minutes down the road. 2
Go get some. 2
L: That’s funny. Funny. 3
Roommate troubles. 2
S: Drama, drama, drama 3
We’re done. 1
Note. S � speaker; L � listener; 1 � regulatory; 2 � event; 3 �
interpretive; 9 � uncodable.
Received August 9, 2007
Revision received September 29, 2008
Accepted October 14, 2008 �
Properties of the Narrative Scoring Scheme
Using Narrative Retells in Young
School-Age Children
John Heilmann
East Carolina University, Greenville, NC
Jon F. Miller
Ann Nockerts
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Claudia Dunaway

San Diego Unified School District, CA
Purpose: To evaluate the clinical utility of the
narrative scoring scheme (NSS) as an index of
narrative macrostructure for young school-age
children.
Method: Oral retells of a wordless picture book
were elicited from 129 typically developing chil-
dren, ages 5–7. A series of correlations and
hierarchical regression equations were completed
using microstructural measures of vocabulary and
grammar to predict NSS scores.
Results: While the NSS was significantly corre-
lated with age and each of the microstructural
measures, the hierarchical regression analyses
revealed a unique relationship between vocabu-
lary and narrative macrostructure.
Conclusion: The NSS is an efficient and informa-
tive tool for documenting children’s development
of narrative macrostructure. The relationship
between the NSS and microstructural measures
demonstrates that it is a robust measure of
children’s overall oral narrative competence and a
powerful tool for clinicians and researchers. The
unique relationship between lexical diversity and
the NSS confirmed that a special relationship
exists between vocabulary and narrative organi-
zation skills in young school-age children.
Key Words: narrative, language sample
analysis, story grammar, vocabulary
A
nalysis of oral narratives provides a rich source of
data that documents children’s language use in a

naturalistic context. Narrative analysis is a highly
effective clinical and research tool, as it allows examiners to
analyze multiple linguistic features simultaneously using a
single short sample. Examiners have the opportunity to doc-
ument children’s productive vocabulary and grammar using
microstructural analyses as well as children’s broader text-
level narrative organization skills by utilizing macrostructural
analyses (see Westby, 2005).
Microstructural analyses primarily focus on children’s lin-
guistic form and content, which are measured within individ-
ual utterances. Linguistic form is commonly assessed by
analyzing children’s grammatical and syntactic abilities using
mean length of utterance (e.g., Brown, 1973; Miller, 1981)
and various measures of sentence complexity (e.g., Nippold,
Hesketh, Duthie, & Mansfield, 2005; Schuele & Tolbert, 2001;
Scott & Stokes, 1995). Measures of linguistic content are used
to document children’s productive vocabulary skills, which
typically calculate children’s lexical diversity using measures
such as type–token ratio (Templin, 1957) and number of dif-
ferent words (Miller, 1987; Miller & Klee, 1995). While these
measures are the most commonly cited microstructural anal-
yses in the literature, this list is in no way exhaustive. Micro-
structural analyses continue to be reviewed, critiqued, and
reanalyzed (see Justice et al., 2006, for a review and
discussion).
Macrostructural analyses, on the other hand, examine
children’s language skills beyond the utterance level and
document children’s ability to relate concepts that transcend
the individual utterance. Most macrostructural analyses of
children’s narratives are rooted in the story grammar tradi-
tion, which proposes that all stories have a setting and episode
system (Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975; Stein &

Glenn, 1979). The setting provides background information
Research
American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology • Vol. 19 •
154–166 • May 2010 • A American Speech-Language-Hearing
Association154
on the characters and their environment, while the episode
system includes three main components that occur in all
stories: (a) a problem (initiating event and/or internal response),
(b) attempts at solving the problem, and (c) consequences/
outcomes. To be a complete episode, a narrator must include
all three of these key components (see Strong, 1998, for a
review). These settings and episodes can be combined in an
infinite number of ways to create individual stories.
Relationship Between Microstructural and
Macrostructural Measures
Previous research has demonstrated that lexical and gram-
matical gains play an important role in children’s acqui-
sition of narrative proficiency (Berman & Slobin, 1994;
Bishop & Donlan, 2005). In their seminal work, Berman and
Slobin (1994) documented the role of linguistic forms taking
on new functions that aid in the organization of narratives.
This work described the trade-offs that occurred when differ-
ent microstructural features were used for different functions,
including the organization of narratives. Children’s narrative
organization skills were positively related to advances in use of
microstructural features, including grammatical forms (e.g.,
verb tense, aspect, and voice), lexical forms (e.g., lexical aspect
and manner/cause of verbs of motion), and lexico-grammatical
features (e.g., locative particles, prepositional phrases, and

connectives). This pattern of results is consistent with Slobin’s
long-standing claim that “new forms first express old func-
tions, and new functions are first expressed by old forms”
(Slobin, 1973, p. 184). Bishop and Donlan (2005) observed
that children’s ability to encode and retell a story was more
strongly related to linguistic ability than nonverbal IQ. Chil-
dren’s microstructures, including complex syntax and relating
causal concepts, were more influential in event memory and
story organization than their cognitive skills. These data docu-
menting the unique relationship between microstructures and
macrostructures are contrary to evidence demonstrating that
children’s narrative organization skills emerge from more
general cognitive capabilities, including executive function
(van den Broek, 1997), and sociolinguistic processes (Eaton,
Collis, & Lewis, 1999; McCabe, 1997; Peterson & McCabe,
2004; Quasthoff, 1997a, 1997b).
Narrative Skills of Children With Language Impairment
Given the strong relationship between microstructural and
macrostructural measures, it is not surprising that children
with language impairment have substantial difficulty using
appropriate vocabulary and grammar when telling stories
(Boudreau & Hedberg, 1999; Gillam & Johnston, 1992; Pearce,
McCormack, & James, 2003; Reilly, Losh, Bellugi, & Wulfeck,
2004) in addition to substantial difficulty with text-level orga-
nization of narratives (Boudreau & Hedberg, 1999; Manhardt
& Rescorla, 2002; Merritt & Liles, 1987; Pearce et al., 2003;
Reilly et al., 2004). The presence of both microstructural
and macrostructural deficits in children with language impair-
ment counters theories that identify the primary cause of
language impairment as deficiencies with grammatical com-
petence (e.g., Clahsen, 1989; Gopnik & Crago, 1991; Rice,
Wexler, & Cleave, 1995). Alternatively, the global narrative
difficulties of children with language impairment suggest that

their language deficits may be due to broader information-
processing deficits, such as a reduced processing capacity
(Boudreau, 2007; Colozzo, Garcia, Megan, Gillam, & Johnston,
2006). Further study of the relationship between children’s
microstructural and macrostructural language skills will pro-
vide a better understanding of the nature of the impairment.
Better understanding of children’s narrative skills in general,
and macrostructural skills in particular, also has substantial
clinical implications. Difficulty with narrative organization
can have a dramatic impact on children with language impair-
ment, as such discourse-level skills are required to effectively
communicate. While vocabulary and grammar deficits limit
children’s ability to produce fully competent utterances, im-
paired macrostructural skills affect children’s ability to gen-
erate coherent and age-appropriate extended discourse.
Furthermore, narratives are a major component of the school
curriculum, and children are expected to understand and use
appropriate narrative form effectively. Therefore, narrative
macrostructure skills must be efficiently and accurately docu-
mented, and should be considered within an extensive assess-
ment protocol for children with language difficulties.
Methods of Measuring Narrative Macrostructure
While most narrative macrostructure measures are rooted
in the story grammar tradition and share the same underlying
principles, the coding of narrative macrostructure varies
widely throughout the literature. Some narrative macro-
structure coding schemes documented children’s inclusion of
specific story grammar components (e.g., Strong, 1998) or
identified the presence or absence of specific story grammar
components for a given story (e.g., Berman, 1988; Boudreau
& Hedberg, 1999; Miles & Chapman, 2002; Reilly et al.,
2004). In these studies, children who produced more story
grammar components and/or more advanced story grammar
features were thought to have stronger narrative organization

skills. The second major class of macrostructural measures
used text-level judgments of children’s narrative proficiency
(Applebee, 1978; Hedberg & Westby, 1993; Stein, 1988).
Rather than identifying the presence or absence of specific
story grammar components, these measures required holistic
judgments by the examiner to rate the quality and develop-
mental level of the narrative.
The major advantage of the simple story grammar coding
procedures is that it facilitates a relatively high level of ac-
curacy across coders. There is less room for differences across
coders, as the coder is only responsible for identifying the
presence or absence of specific story-related themes. The
major disadvantage of simple story grammar analyses is that
they are potentially limited in their ability to account for the
abstract interutterance concepts and qualitative aspects of the
narrative, or the story’s “sparkle” (Peterson & McCabe, 1983).
McFadden and Gillam (1996) demonstrated that holistic rat-
ings of children’s narratives capture the more refined aspects of
narratives, such as charm and depth, and that these ratings were
better than simple story grammar analyses for documenting
differences between children with language impairment and
their typically developing peers between the ages of 9;0 (years;
months) and 11;7.
Heilmann et al.: Properties of the Narrative Scoring Scheme 155
Additional Skills Required to Tell an Effective Story:
Beyond Story Grammar
The development of narratives in children and adults has
been studied extensively and has revealed additional areas of
advancement beyond inclusion of story grammar features,
including children’s use of literate language and cohesive de-

vices (Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1991; Halliday & Hasan,
1976; Hedberg & Westby, 1993; Wigglesworth, 1997). Use of
literate language occurs when children use abstract language
features commonly used by teachers and found in the curri-
culum (Westby, 2005). Some key literate language features
related to narrative competence include use of metacognitive
verbs (e.g., think or know), metalinguistic verbs (e.g., say or
talk), and elaborated noun phrases (e.g., the boy in the restau-
rant with the frog; see Nippold, 2007, and Westby, 2005, for a
review). Bamberg and Damrad-Frye (1991) identified that
more sophisticated and later developing narratives included
abstract language such as metacognitive and metalinguistic
verbs. In their analysis of productions of Frog, Where Are
You? (Mayer, 1969), Bamberg and Damrad-Frye identified
that these abstract language skills emerged at age 5 years,
demonstrated robust development through adulthood, and
were essential for relating the hierarchical relationships be-
tween events in complex narrative productions. Additional
studies have identified that literate language skills were pres-
ent in children’s oral narratives during the preschool years
(Curenton & Justice, 2004), developed through the school
years and into adolescence (Greenhalgh & Strong, 2001;
Nippold, 2007; Pelligrini, Galda, Bartini, & Charak, 1998),
and were used less frequently by children with language im-
pairment (Greenhalgh & Strong, 2001).
Another high-level narrative feature that continues to develop
through the school years is the cohesiveness of children’s nar-
rative productions (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Wigglesworth,
1997). To tell a story, narrators must effectively use cohesive
devices to carry concepts across individual utterances. Three
major categories of cohesive devices are (a) referential cohe-
sion, which allows a narrator to maintain appropriate refer-
ence to the characters, objects, and locations across utterances
using both noun phrases and pronouns; (b) conjunctive cohe-
sion, which allows a narrator to sustain concepts across phrases

and utterances using conjunctive words and phrases (e.g.,
and, but, besides, on the other hand, finally, in addition); and
(c) lexical cohesion, which allows a narrator to effectively use
vocabulary to link concepts across utterances. Measures of
cohesiveness can be a sensitive index of language use, as
children with language impairment have more difficulty with
correct use of cohesive ties (Hedberg & Westby, 1993; Liles,
1985; Strong & Shaver, 1991). While cohesion is often con-
sidered a microstructural measure, we treated it as a macro-
structural measure because aspects of cohesion transcend
individual utterances and are necessary for producing coher-
ent narratives.
The Narrative Scoring Scheme: A Comprehensive
Measure of Narrative Proficiency
Our goal in developing the narrative scoring scheme (NSS)
was to create a metric that documents the range of skills
required
for school-age children to effectively tell a coherent and in-
teresting story (see Appendix). To extend beyond simple story
grammar analyses, the NSS incorporates multiple aspects of
the narrative process into a single scoring rubric and provides
an overall impression of the child’s narrative ability. This
metric combines both the basic features of the story grammar
approaches as well as the higher level narrative skills that
continue to develop through the school-age years. In addition
to adding higher level narrative skills in the scoring scheme,
the NSS uses a combination of discrete coding criteria and
examiner judgment. The NSS was created to improve on the
simple story grammar measures by requiring the examiners to
make interutterance text-level judgments, which have been
shown to be more effective than discrete coding schemes in
identifying children with language impairment (McFadden &
Gillam, 1996). By breaking the judgments into seven skill

areas, examiners have the opportunity to reflect on each com-
ponent of the narrative process and judge the child’s profi-
ciency in that area. This combination of explicit scoring
guidelines and flexibility to allow for examiner judgment
reflects the hybrid nature of the NSS. The scores from the
seven NSS categories are combined to provide a single com-
posite score, which allows the examiner to generate an index
of children’s overall narrative ability.
The first step in developing the NSS was establishing the
key components from the story grammar literature, which
included the story’s introduction, the major conflicts and res-
olutions (conflict resolution), and a conclusion. To document
children’s use of literate language, the NSS includes catego-
ries that assess metacognitive and metalinguistic verbs. The
mental states component documents children’s abilities to use
metacognitive verbs (e.g., think and know) to describe the
characters’ thoughts and feelings. The characterdevelopment
component of the NSS also documents children’s literate
language skills by measuring the ability to use metalinguistic
verbs (e.g., talk and say), differentiate between main and sup-
porting characters, and talk in the first person to depict the
characters in the story. The NSS evaluates two separate as-
pects of cohesive ties that were adapted from Halliday and
Hasan (1976). The referencing component measures aspects
of referential cohesion, including appropriate use of pronouns
and antecedents. The cohesion component documents the
conjunctive and lexical aspects of cohesion, including appro-
priate ordering, emphasis of critical events, and transitions
between events.
Goals of the Study
Children’s performance on the NSS has been reported in
studies that examined the narrative organization skills of na-
tive Spanish-speaking children who were learning English

as a second language (Miller et al., 2006). The goal of the
present study was to describe the NSS from a clinical perspec-
tive and to further analyze the linguistic properties of the
measure in a group of children who were fluent in English.
Furthermore, the literature has revealed that there is a special
relationship between children’s microstructural and macro-
structural language skills (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Bishop &
Donlan, 2005). To better understand the linguistic properties of
the NSS and to extend our understanding of the relationship
156 American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology • Vol. 19
• 154–166 • May 2010
between microstructural and macrostructural measures, a
second goal was to document the relationship between chil-
dren’s vocabulary, grammar, and narrative organization skills.
To achieve this, we examined the relationship between mea-
sures of vocabulary, grammar, and the NSS. These analyses
further clarified the key constructs that the NSS is measuring
and also provided additional evidence for the role of vocabu-
lary and grammar in the development of young school-age
children’s narrative organization skills. This study addressed
the following questions:
1. Are age and measures of vocabulary and grammar signifi-
cantly correlated with NSS scores in narrative retells of
young school-age children?
2. Are measures of vocabulary uniquely related to NSS scores
in narrative retells of young school-age children?
3. Are measures of grammar uniquely related to NSS scores
in narrative retells of young school-age children?

Method
Participants
A total of 129 typically developing children age 5–7 years
were recruited for this study. The children were recruited from
public schools in the San Diego (CA) City School and Cajon
Valley School Districts. Administrators from the two districts
assisted with obtaining informed consent from each of the
children’s primary caregivers. The pool of potential partici-
pants was reviewed by the school’s speech-language pathol-
ogists (SLPs) and classroom teachers to identify children who
qualified for the study. To participate in the study, children
were required to have average scores on all summative class-
room, district, and state assessments. The classroom teachers
reviewed the records for each student to identify him or her
as average performing. The child’s academic record was also
reviewed to identify that he or she had no history of language
impairment and/or learning disability. While academic data
were used as inclusionary criteria for the participants, test
scores and descriptions of performance were not recorded and
were not available for further analysis. The majority of the
participants were native English speakers. A small percentage
of the children were Spanish/English bilingual and designated
as “fluent English.” This designation was made by the child’s
respective school district and was based on a passing grade on
an English proficiency test and grade-level academics. The
SLPs and teachers confirmed that each child met the inclu-
sionary criteria and enrolled the eligible children in the study.
The individual children participating in the study provided
verbal assent prior to completing the protocol.
Table 1 summarizes the demographic data for the partici-
pants. Sixty-one percent of the participants were in kinder-
garten, 36% of the children were in first grade, and 2% were
in preschool. The numbers of male and female participants
were roughly equal, with slightly fewer boys than girls. The

school SLPs attempted to recruit students who reflected the
racial and ethnic diversity of their schools. The SLPs first
identified the children’s ethnicity (Hispanic or not Hispanic)
and then documented the non-Hispanic children’s race. A
review of the race and ethnicity data revealed that the sample
is a relatively heterogeneous group. Socioeconomic status
was measured by calculating the highest number of years
of education that the child’s mother completed. On average,
mothers completed 14.4 years of education (SD = 2.5), with
a range of 9–20 years. The majority of the mothers completed
at least some college, while only eight of the children’s
mothers did not complete high school.
Procedure
Each participant completed a narrative retell of the word-
less picture book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). The
purpose of collecting the narratives was to establish a nor-
mative database reflecting typically developing children’s
oral narrative skills and to further our understanding of chil-
dren’s developing narrative competence. The head SLP from
each district was responsible for training 18 school-based
SLPs to elicit the oral narratives. The head SLP and clinicians
met on three separate occasions and had the opportunity to
practice the protocol with each other several times. The clini-
cians read the scripted instructions to the students and cued
them to listen to a taped version of the story while following
along with the pictures in the book. The students then retold the
story using the book as an aid. Examiner prompts were limited
to encouragement to begin the story and open-ended cues to
continue the retell. The scripted instructions and audiotaped
story script were adapted from the Strong Narrative Assess-
ment Procedure (Strong, 1998) and were used to facilitate
high fidelity among the numerous examiners completing the
language sample elicitation.

Transcription and Coding
The children’s narrative productions were digitally recorded
and sent to the Language Analysis Lab at the University of
Wisconsin—Madison, where they were transcribed by trained
research assistants who had at least 10 hr of transcription
TABLE 1. Demographic data for all participants.
Variable n
Grade
Preschool 3
Kindergarten 79
First grade 47
Sex
Female 69
Male 60
Race/ethnicity
White 87
Hispanic 16
Othera 15
African American 7
No data 4
Note. Ethnicity data were collected for children who were
Hispanic or
Latino. Race data are provided for all children who were non-
Hispanic/
non-Latino.
aOther races/ethnicities included Arabic (2), Chinese (3),
Japanese (2),
Korean (1), Filipino (5), Portuguese (1), and Samoan (1).

experience using standard coding conventions for Systematic
Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software (Miller &
Iglesias, 2008). Utterances were segmented into communi-
cation units (C-units; Labov & Waletzky, 1967), which in-
cluded a main clause and all dependent clauses. The transcripts
began and ended with the child’s first and last utterance, re-
spectively. See Miller and Iglesias (2008) for a full review of
the transcription conventions.
After completing the orthographic transcription, the research
assistant reviewed the transcript and completed the NSS. To
score the NSS, the transcriber carefully reviewed the narrative
transcript and assigned a score of 0–5 for each of the seven
categories summarized in the Appendix. Categories that could
not be scored received a score of zero or NA. Scores of zero
were given if the child did something that precluded the ex-
aminer from scoring a section of the NSS, such as skipping
a part of the story or refusing to complete the task. If there was
an error on the part of the examiner (e.g., not following the
protocol or problems with the recording), sections of the NSS
that were affected were not scored, and the examiner coded the
section as not applicable for analysis (i.e., NA). For all other
sections, scores of 1 reflected minimal presence/immature
performance, scores of 3 reflected emerging skills, and scores
of 5 reflected proficient performance. Transcribers also had
the opportunity to assign scores of 2 and 4 if performance was
judged to be between the major anchors. To improve the
accuracy of the scoring procedure, specific guidelines were
provided for scores of 1, 3, and 5 (see the Appendix). These
guidelines assisted the transcriber in assigning an accurate
score that reflected the child’s performance in each compo-

nent of the narrative process and reduced the abstractness of
the narrative macrostructure concepts. The scoring across the
seven categories received equal weighting because the liter-
ature revealed that each of these seven narrative aspects is
necessary for telling a well-developed story. Furthermore,
keeping the scoring rules straightforward and consistent
facilitates simple and accurate scoring. A comprehensive
training procedure is available on the SALT Web site (www.
saltsoftware.com/training/handcoded/) that includes an
overview of the NSS; scoring tips; a description of how to
enter NSS scores into a SALT file; excerpts from samples
demonstrating minimal/immature, emerging, and proficient
performance across each section of the NSS; and a set of
practice transcripts.
In addition to the NSS, the transcribers completed coding
for the subordination index (SI; Scott & Stokes, 1995; Strong,
1998). The transcribers added a code to each C-unit that sum-
marized the number of independent and dependent clauses.
C-units that were incomplete, unintelligible, or nonverbal, or
that had an error at the utterance level, were excluded from
the analysis. Utterance-level errors included incorrect word
order, omission of more than two words in an utterance, and
utterances that simply did not make sense. Elliptical responses
to
examiner questions were also excluded from the SI analysis.
Utterances in which the child inappropriately omitted the sub-
ject or copula were coded and received a score of zero. After
each C-unit was coded, the SI was generated by dividing
the total number of clauses (both main and subordinate) by
the total number of C-units. After all the narratives were
transcribed and coded, the transcripts were analyzed using
SALT (Miller & Iglesias, 2008), which produced a rectan-
gular data file summarizing each dependent measure for each
of the transcripts. This file was formatted for statistical anal-

ysis using SPSS Version 16.0.
Agreement
Accuracy of the transcription and coding process was ex-
amined at three levels. Protocol accuracy was calculated by
the principal investigator, who reviewed 10% of the written
transcripts to identify whether the transcribers were adhering
to the transcription conventions. Percentage agreement be-
tween the transcribers and principal investigator was 98%
for segmentation rules, 99% for word-level codes, and 98%
for coding of reduplications and reformulations (i.e., mazes).
To determine transcription accuracy and coding agreement,
10% of the narratives were independently transcribed and
coded for the NSS and SI by a second research assistant.
Transcription accuracy was calculated by comparing the in-
dependent transcripts at the word and morpheme level (94%
agreement), utterance segmentation decisions (98% agree-
ment), placement of mazes (93% agreement), and utterance
types (100% agreement).
Calculating agreement for the two coding schemes pre-
sented a greater challenge. Simple interrater agreement scores
can be misleading, as small differences between coders (e.g.,
NSS scores of 24 and 25) are treated the same as large dif-
ferences between coders (e.g., NSS scores of 16 and 28).
Therefore, agreement for the NSS and SI coding was calcu-
lated using Krippendorff’s alpha, which accounted for both
chance agreement and the degree of difference between tran-
scribers (Krippendorff, 1980). Alpha values accounting for
differences in ordinal data were calculated using the summed
NSS and SI scores that were calculated by the two independent
transcribers (a = .92 for SI; a = .79 for NSS). Krippendorff
established benchmarks for alpha values, with ≥.80 reflecting
adequate agreement and values between .67 and .80 reflect-
ing acceptable agreement for exploratory research and draw-

ing tentative conclusions. For a review of the accuracy and
agreement process and a further discussion of Krippendorff’s
alpha, see Heilmann et al. (2008).
Language Sample Measures
To test the relationship between microstructural measures
and the NSS, we used the following language sample mea-
sures that repeatedly have been found to be robust and devel-
opmentally sensitive to the population and context used in the
present study (i.e., typically developing 5–7-year-olds who
produced oral narratives):
Length/productivity. Number of total words (NTW) is a
measure of productivity that documents the amount of infor-
mation provided in the story (Allen, Kertoy, Sherblom, &
Pettit, 1994; Paul & Smith, 1993). In addition, NTW was used
to assist with statistically controlling sample length, which has
the potential to affect additional language sample measures.
Vocabulary. Number of different words (NDW) is a mea-
sure of lexical diversity that provides a robust estimate of
children’s productive vocabulary (Klee, 1992; Miller, 1987;
Miller & Klee, 1995) and has been widely used as an index of
• 154–166 • May 2010
vocabulary skills in studies examining children’s oral nar-
rative skills (Gazella & Stockman, 2003; Humphries, Cardy,
Worling, & Peets, 2004; Swanson, Fey, Mills, & Hood, 2005;
Uccelli & Páez, 2007).
Grammar. Mean length of C-unit (MLCU) measures the

average number of morphemes that children use per C-unit
and is an index of general grammatical skills that increases with
age through the school-age years, particularly when analyzed
using narratives and expositories (Leadholm & Miller, 1992;
Nippold et al., 2005). Also, the SI, a measure of clausal density,
indicates the average number of subordinate clauses produced
per C-unit. Use of subordinate clauses emerges during the
preschool years (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000) and continues
to develop through the school-age years (Nippold, 2007).
Because the productions of oral narratives were relatively
short, issues of sample length required special consideration.
For conversational language samples, it is common practice to
control sample length across children by using a consistent
number of utterances, words, or elapsed time (e.g., 50 utter-
ances; Miller, 1981). In the present study, children produced
between 12 and 77 utterances. Using a standard transcrip-
tion cut of 50 utterances would limit the analyses to 11 tran-
scripts. If we chose to maintain 75% of the data, 97 transcripts
would remain in the analysis, and each transcript would be
cut at 29 utterances and would ultimately withhold 955 utter-
ances from the data set. Our goal was to maintain the maxi-
mum amount of data available by maintaining the entire sample
and to use statistical procedures to account for differences
in transcript length. Furthermore, using the entire sample for
linguistic analyses, including NDW, is common practice in
contemporary studies of children’s oral narratives (Gazella &
Stockman, 2003; Humphries et al., 2004; Swanson et al.,
2005; Uccelli & Páez, 2007).
Results
The NSS scores were first reviewed to identify how many
child and examiner errors precluded scores to be adminis-
tered. In the present study, a total of 903 scores were completed
using the children’s narrative transcripts (seven categories were

scored across 129 transcripts). Across the 903 sections, only
six sections received scores of zero (four stories lacked an in-
troduction, and two children omitted a conclusion), and only
one of the 903 sections received a score of NA; 99% of the
NSS sections were able to be scored correctly, confirming that
the training and elicitation procedures facilitated a high level
of child compliance and examiner fidelity during the elici-
tation process.
The skewness statistic was calculated for the NSS to de-
termine if there was an unequal distribution of NSS scores
across the sample (see Coolican, 2004, for a review). Skew-
ness measures of zero indicate a perfectly normal distribution,
while skewness values below –0.8 or above 0.8 have been
described as “noticeably skewed” (Bourque & Clark, 1992,
p. 69). The skewness statistic for the NSS was –0.5, indicat-
ing that scores were more concentrated toward the ceiling
but were not noticeably skewed according to the criteria
established by Bourque and Clark.
Descriptive statistics for age, the NSS, and each of the
microstructural measures are presented in Table 2. Table 2
also summarizes the bivariate correlations between the NSS,
children’s age, and each of the microstructures. All correla-
tions were significant and were moderate in strength (Cohen,
1988).
To further explore the covariance structure between the
variables and to identify unique relationships between the
microstructures and the NSS, two separate hierarchical re-
gression equations were completed. Hierarchical regressions
allow examination of variance that is uniquely explained by a
given variable. The first hierarchical regression equation is
summarized in Table 3. Sample length was first controlled by
entering NTW into Model 1. Length was controlled because

measures of lexical diversity are inevitably influenced by the
NTW in the sample (Malvern & Richards, 2002). That is, the
more total words that a child produces, the more opportunity
he or she has to produce different words.
Model 2 identified the unique relationship between vocab-
ulary and NSS after controlling for length. Taken together,
NTWand NDW were significantly correlated with NSS scores
(r = .58). Adding NDW in Model 2 increased the explained
variance from 24% to 33%, a net increase of 9%. A one-way
analysis of variance was completed to determine whether the
increase in explained variance was significant, and an f 2 sta-
tistic was calculated to estimate its effect size. According to
Cohen (1988), effect sizes of 0.02, 0.15, and 0.35 are con-
sidered small, medium, and large, respectively. The 9% increase
in explained variance was significant, F(1, 124) = 16.5,
p < .001, f 2 = 0.12, demonstrating that NDW was uniquely
TABLE 2. Descriptive statistics for language sample measures
and correlations with the narrative scoring scheme (NSS).
Measure M SD Range
Correlation
with NSS
Age 6.0 0.7 5.0–7.0 .30*
Narrative macrostructure
(NSS)
19.0 3.0 11.0–26.0 —
Productivity (NTW) 264.1 77.2 133.0–608.0 .50**
Vocabulary (NDW) 92.5 19.0 47.0–150.0 .58**
Grammar (MLCU) 7.0 0.9 4.8–9.6 .44**
Grammar (SI) 1.1 0.1 1.0–1.3 .35**

Note. NTW = number of total words; NDW = number of
different
words; MLCU = mean length of C-unit; SI = subordination
index.
*p = .001. **p < .001.
TABLE 3. Summary of hierarchical regression analysis with
grammatical measures uniquely predicting NSS scores in
Model 3.
Model Predictors r Adjusted r2 r2 change
1 Productivity (NTW) .50 .24*
2 Productivity (NTW) .58 .33* .09*
Vocabulary (NDW)
3 Productivity (NTW) .61 .35* .02
Vocabulary (NDW)
Grammar (MLCU, SI)
*Significant at p < .01.
related to children’s NSS scores above and beyond the vari-
ability explained by NTW.
Model 3 was completed to identify if there was a unique
relationship between the two grammatical measures (MLCU
and SI) and NSS scores, after controlling for NTW and NDW.
The measures in this final model were significantly correlated
with the NSS (r = .61). Adding MLCU and SI to the third

regression equation added an additional 2% prediction to NSS
scores, which was not significant, F(2, 122) = 2.9, p = .060,
f 2 = 0.03. In this first hierarchical regression analysis, NDW
uniquely predicted NSS scores after controlling for length
using NTW. The two grammatical measures, however, did
not add unique prediction of children’s NSS scores. To con-
firm that NDW was the major unique predictor of NSS scores, a
second hierarchical regression equation was completed and is
summarized in Table 4. Again, sample length was controlled
by entering NTW in the first model. The two grammatical
measures were next entered in the second equation, which
resulted in a combined correlation of r = .57. Adding SI and
MLCU to NTW increased the explained variance from .24
to .30, documenting that the grammatical measures explain
6% of the variance in NSS after controlling for sample length.
This increase was significant, F(2, 123) = 6.0, p = .002,
f 2 = 0.08. NDW was added to the third model to test the
unique prediction of vocabulary on NSS scores. Adding NDW
in the third model resulted in a 5% increase in explained
variance between the microstructures and NSS, which was
significant, F(1, 122) = 8.7, p = .003, f 2 = 0.06.
In sum, this series of hierarchical regression equations
documented that children’s use of vocabulary is the major
significant and unique microstructural variable in predicting
their story organization skills as measured by the NSS. Chil-
dren’s productive grammar, while significantly correlated
with NSS scores, did not provide unique prediction of the
children’s narrative macrostructure ability.
Discussion
Upon establishing a set of reference databases for chil-
dren’s narrative retells, the Language Analysis Lab at the
University of Wisconsin—Madison set out to identify a clini-
cally useful measure of children’s narrative organization skills.

The NSS was created to bring together the benefits of con-
crete scoring criteria combined with judgment of text-level
constructs. The NSS also incorporated higher level narrative
components, including cohesive markers and measures of
literate language, to measure a wider range of skills than tradi-
tional story grammar analyses.
To determine whether the NSS was developmentally ap-
propriate for the children in this study, the skewness statistic
was calculated. This analysis revealed that the data were not
noticeably skewed according to Borque and Clark’s (1992)
criteria and that the NSS appeared to be a sensitive measure for
school-age children who produced an oral retell. (We are cur-
rently completing a more thorough investigation of the de-
velopmental sensitivity of the NSS as compared to alternative
methods of documenting narrative macrostructure skills.)
To document the relationship between the microstructural
features of language samples and children’s performance on
the NSS, a series of correlation and hierarchical regression
analyses were completed. These analyses confirmed that a close
relationship existed between children’s productivity, vocab-
ulary, grammar, and narrative macrostructure skills. The
correlation analyses documented that age and each of the
microstructural measures (NTW, NDW, MLCU, and SI)
were significantly correlated with children’s narrative organi-
zation skills. It is noteworthy that the correlation between age
and NSS was the weakest observed correlation. The socio-
cultural theory of narrative macrostructure development pro-
poses that children who have more experience with stories
will have greater narrative competence (e.g., Eaton et al., 1999;
Stein & Glenn, 1979). The children in the present sample
spanned 2 years in age. The older children in this sample likely
had more experience listening to and telling stories. How-
ever, it was the children’s vocabulary and grammar skills that

were most strongly related to their narrative macrostructure
scores. While this study did not directly control for the amount
of experience the children had with narratives, the data pro-
vide some additional evidence for the importance of chil-
dren’s linguistic proficiency in predicting narrative organization
skills (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Bishop & Donlan, 2005).
Two separate hierarchical regression analyses were com-
pleted to identify the unique relationships between each of
the microstructures and NSS scores. After controlling for
length, the unique relationship between the NSS and mea-
sures of vocabulary and grammar was calculated. The anal-
yses showed that children’s productive vocabulary skills were
the only unique predictor of narrative organization skills.
Grammatical measures, on the other hand, provided no unique
prediction of NSS scores. The unique importance of vocab-
ulary in predicting narrative organization skills was a novel
finding. Bishop and Donlan (2005) documented that children’s
use of complex syntax and expression of causal concepts
uniquely predicted children’s ability to organize their oral
narratives. Bishop and Donlan examined children between
7 and 9 years of age, while the present study investigated
children age 5–7 years. The children in the present study were
using minimal complex syntax. As observed in Table 2, SI
values averaged 1.1, showing that children produce approx-
imately one subordinate clause every 10 utterances. The
children’s use of subordination may have been influenced by
the story used in this study; the children’s SI values, on aver-
age, were just slightly lower than the SI value from the story
script (SI = 1.15). These low levels of subordination could
explain, in part, the modest correlations and lack of a unique
relationship between the grammatical measures and the NSS.
TABLE 4. Summary of hierarchical regression analysis with
vocabulary measures uniquely predicting NSS scores in
Model 3.

Model Predictors r Adjusted r2 r2 change
1 Productivity (NTW) .50 .24*
Grammar (MLCU, SI)
Grammar (MLCU, SI)
Vocabulary (NDW)
*Significant at p < .01.
• 154–166 • May 2010
Relationship Between Vocabulary and the NSS
The present study revealed that there is a special and im-
portant relationship between narrative organization and vo-
cabulary skills that emerges prior to children becoming fully
literate. This study demonstrated that the development of
story schema and vocabulary acquisition is developing along
a similar path. The importance of vocabulary in narrative
organization skills is not surprising given the literature de-
scribing the development of narrative form. Preschool and
young school-age children typically produce narratives that
simply chain sequences of events in temporal order (Berman,
1988) and provide simple descriptive sequences (Stein &
Glenn, 1979). It is not until the later school-age years that
children hierarchically organize the events in their narrative
productions (Berman, 1988) and take multiple perspectives to
relate the events (Stein & Glenn, 1979). To produce these

more advanced narratives, children must use complex syntax
(Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1991; Bishop & Donlan, 2005).
Before children are proficient in using complex syntax, they
likely have to rely on their vocabulary skills to organize their
narrative productions. Furthermore, the emerging literacy
literature has documented the importance of vocabulary in the
development of children’s narrative and comprehension skills.
There is a well-documented relationship between children’s
vocabulary skills and reading comprehension (see Scarborough,
2001). Furthermore, preschool and young school-age chil-
dren acquire new vocabulary through repeated exposures to
narrative form (Robbins & Ehri, 1994; Senechal & Cornell,
1993) and by receiving adult scaffolding that highlights
the story’s structure (Hargrave & Senechal, 2000; Penno,
Wilkinson, & Moore, 2002).
Limitations
The results from the hierarchical regression equations
could have been affected by the sampling context. Because all
of the measures were collected from a single language sam-
ple, high internal validity was achieved. While each of the
language sample measures theoretically and empirically re-
flects its respective linguistic domain, strong intercorrelations
between language sample measures have been observed (Miller
& Klee, 1995). The hierarchical regression equations did af-
ford better understanding of the covariance structure. How-
ever, vocabulary and grammatical measures acquired from
alternate tasks may provide a more informative test of the
relationship between vocabulary, grammar, and narrative
macrostructure.
Clinical Implications
The NSS was created as a clinically useful comprehensive
narrative macrostructure measure. To be clinically feasible,

an assessment tool must be able to be completed in a short
amount of time to accommodate the busy schedule of the SLP.
In our lab, trained transcribers could complete the NSS using
a narrative transcript in approximately 3 min. In addition to
efficient scoring, the NSS was developed to facilitate accurate
scoring both within and between examiners. The Krippen-
dorff alpha analyses revealed that the NSS had lower inter-
rater agreement than we would ideally observe and that the
NSS alpha was not as high as the alpha for the SI. The dif-
ference in alphas between the NSS and SI was not surprising,
however, as the NSS requires much greater individual judg-
ment when compared to the relatively straightforward scoring
rules for the SI. However, recall that these subjective ratings
are often the most sensitive when identifying children with
language impairment (e.g., McFadden & Gillam, 1996). Our
goal is to continue developing new training methods and
complete additional research identifying ways to increase
coding accuracy for the NSS and other macrostructural anal-
yses of children’s natural language use.
Upon scoring the NSS, clinicians are provided with a clini-
cally useful benchmark for children’s overall narrative profi-
ciency. The data described in this study used the composite
NSS score, which was the summed score for all seven sec-
tions of the NSS. We proposed that the NSS composite score
provided an index of children’s overall narrative organization
skills. The NSS data described in this study are available as
part of the SALT Narrative Story Retell database and can be
downloaded free of charge from the SALT Web site. SALT
software, used to access the data, can compare a target child’s
NSS scores with those of age-matched peers. In addition to
comparing NSS scores to the SALT database, composite NSS
scores can be useful for monitoring progress and documenting
treatment outcomes by collecting multiple narrative samples
from a child and documenting changes in NSS scores over

time.
The NSS also provides examiners with the opportunity to
identify specific aspects of the narrative process that are dif-
ficult for a child. Because the NSS separately judges seven
aspects of the narrative process, examiners can evaluate per-
formance on each section of the NSS to identify areas of
strength and areas that require intervention. Compared with
narrative macrostructure measures that make holistic text-
level judgments of narrative proficiency, there is greater spe-
cificity in the NSS scoring procedure. Having a detailed
narrative performance profile facilitates a more accurate de-
scription of the child’s performance and can assist in the
development of treatment goals. For example, a child who
performed poorly on the referencing and cohesion sections of
the NSS but did well on the other sections likely has difficulty
using cohesive devices. Treatment goals could include im-
proving the child’s use of referential, lexical, and conjunctive
cohesion.
Increasing our understanding of the relationships between
vocabulary, grammar, and narrative macrostructure has im-
portant clinical implications for documenting functional out-
comes and identifying treatment goals. One goal of language
intervention programs is for the therapy tasks to generalize
to functional tasks. Telling a well-formed narrative is a func-
tional task that is important to children’s academic success
(Bishop & Edmundson, 1987; Griffin, Hemphill, Camp, &
Wolf, 2004; O’Neill, Pearce, & Pick, 2004). The data from the
present study demonstrated that vocabulary skills were uniquely
related to children’s story organization skills. Therefore, a
treatment procedure that increases a child’s vocabulary skills
would have broader, more functional outcomes if concurrent
increases in his or her narrative macrostructure skills were
documented. Similarly, we may expect that treatments ad-
dressing narrative macrostructure skills could also result in

concurrent increases in vocabulary skills. Clearer understand-
ing of the relationship between microstructures and macro-
structures will facilitate selection of appropriate treatment
goals. Understanding these relationships can aid in identifying
the appropriate microstructures to address when implement-
ing interventions that focus on linguistic macrostructures, such
as narrative organization. It is important to note that the data
in this study are purely correlational and that further research
is needed before causal relationships between vocabulary,
grammar, and narrative macrostructure can be identified.
In sum, narrative language assessment is an effective
method for documenting children’s language skills. The NSS
was developed by the Language Analysis Lab as a clinically
useful index of children’s narrative organization skills. Given
its clinical feasibility and its robust relationship with other
linguistic measures, the NSS provides clinicians and re-
searchers with an additional tool to document children’s global
language skills using a functional and curriculum-oriented
task.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by National Institutes of Health
Grant 5 T32 DC005459 (“Interdisciplinary Research Training in
Speech-Language Disorders”) and by the Language Analysis
Lab at
the University of Wisconsin—Madison. This work was also
made
possible through close collaboration with two public school
districts

in San Diego County: San Diego City Schools and Cajon Valley
Union Schools. The authors express appreciation to Karen
Andriacchi
and the research assistants from the Language Analysis Lab for
their
assistance with transcription and organization of the data.
Portions
of this article were presented at the 2006 American Speech-
Language-
Hearing Association Annual Convention in Miami, FL.
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Received March 24, 2008
Revision received December 1, 2008
Accepted November 30, 2009
DOI: 10.1044/1058-0360(2009/08-0024)
Contact author: John Heilmann, East Carolina University,
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Health
Sciences Building, Room 3310T, Greenville, NC 27858-4353.
E-mail: [email protected]
• 154–166 • May 2010
Appendix (p. 1 of 2)
The Narrative Scoring Scheme
Characteristic Proficient Emerging Minimal/immature
Introduction Setting Setting -Child launches into story
with no attempt to provide
the setting.
-Child states general place and provides
some detail about the setting (e.g.,
reference to the time of the setting—
daytime, bedtime, or season).
-Child states general setting but
provides no detail.
-Setting elements are stated at
appropriate place in story.

-Description or elements of story
are given intermittently
through story.
Characters
-Child may provide description
of specific element of setting
(e.g., the frog is in the jar).
-Main characters are introduced
with some description or
detail provided.
OR
Characters
-Characters of story are mentioned
with no detail or description.
Character
development
-Main character(s) and all supporting
character(s) are mentioned.
-Both main and active supporting
characters are mentioned.
-Inconsistent mention is made of
involved or active characters.
-Throughout story it is clear that child
can discriminate between main and
supporting characters (e.g., more
description of and emphasis on

main character[s]).
-Main characters are not clearly
distinguished from supporting
characters.
-Characters necessary for
advancing the plot are
not present.
-Child narrates in first person using
character voice (e.g., “You get out
of my tree,” said the owl).
Mental states -Mental states of main and supporting
characters are expressed when
necessary for plot development
and advancement.
-Some mental state words are
used to develop character(s).
No use is made of mental state
words to develop characters.
-A variety of mental state words are used.
-A limited number of mental state
words are used inconsistently
throughout the story.
Referencing -Child provides necessary antecedents
to pronouns.
-Referents/antecedents are used
inconsistently.

-Pronouns are used excessively.
-References are clear throughout story.
-No verbal clarifiers are used.
-Child is unaware listener is confused.
Conflict
resolution
-Child clearly states all conflicts and
resolutions critical to advancing
the plot of the story.
-Description of conflicts and
resolutions critical to
advancing the plot of the
story is underdeveloped.
-Random resolution is stated with
no mention of cause or conflict.
OR
OR
-Not all conflicts and resolutions
critical to advancing the plot
are present.
-Conflict is mentioned without
resolution.
OR
-Many conflicts and resolutions

critical to advancing the
plot are not present.
Cohesion -Events follow a logical order. -Events follow a
logical order. -No use is made of smooth
transitions.-Critical events are included, while less
emphasis is placed on minor events.
-Excessive detail or emphasis
provided on minor events
leads the listener astray.-Smooth transitions are provided
between events. OR
-Transitions to next event are unclear.
OR
-Minimal detail is given for critical events.
OR
-Equal emphasis is placed on all events.
Appendix (p. 1 of 2)? (p. NaN )
Characteristic Proficient Emerging Minimal/immature
Conclusion -Story is clearly wrapped up using
general concluding statements
such as “and they were together
again happy as could be.”
-Specific event is concluded, but no

general statement is made as
to the conclusion of the whole story.
-Child stops narrating, and
listener may need to ask if that
is the end.
Scoring: Each characteristic receives a scaled score of 0–5.
Proficient characteristics = 5; Emerging = 3; Minimal/immature
= 1. Scores between
(i.e., 2 and 4) are undefined; use judgment. Scores of zero and
NA are defined below. A composite is scored by adding the
total of the characteristic
scores. Highest score = 35.
A score of zero is given for child errors (such as telling the
wrong story, conversing with examiner, not completing/refusing
task, using wrong
language and creating inability of scorer to comprehend story in
target language, abandoned utterances, unintelligibility, poor
performance, or
components of rubric are in imitation-only).
A score of NA (nonapplicable) is given for
mechanical/examiner/operator errors (such as interference from
background noise, issues with recording
such as cut-offs or interruptions, examiner quitting before child
does, examiner not following protocol, or examiner asking
overly specific or leading
questions rather than open-ended questions or prompts).
Appendix (p. 2 of 2)

• 154–166 • May 2010
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