In a recently published study in the journal npj Science of Learning, researchers have discovered a significant relationship between the way children tell stories and their reading abilities. This research found that children who displayed more complex narrative structures in their oral stories tended to perform better on reading tests several months later. This link appears to be independent of the child’s intelligence and understanding of others’ perspectives.
Reading is fundamental to learning, serving as the basis for understanding subjects such as history, science, and geography. As children learn to read, their cognitive abilities also develop, allowing them to handle more complex language structures. Previous research suggested that the way children tell stories could indicate their cognitive development, but it was unclear how this relates to reading skills. The researchers aimed to explore this relationship in detail, hoping to identify early indicators of reading difficulties.
“Ten years ago, I started this line of study. I knew the potential of other natural language processing tools for the application on mental health, but all of them required representative corpora,” said study author Natália Bezerra Mota, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and founder of Mobile Brain.
“As it was no corpora available in Brazilian Portuguese, I’ve developed a strategy to study the structure of language, not the content, and also associated with psychopathological signs. This strategy based on graph theory is language invariant and allows the study across languages as well.”
The study included 253 children aged 5 to 8 from private schools in São Paulo, Brazil. The researchers began their study in March, at the start of the school year, and conducted subsequent assessments in April, June, August, and October.
During these sessions, children were shown three images depicting positive scenarios (a baby, a dog, and a dessert) and asked to create stories about each one. These stories were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using a graph-theoretical approach. This method involved representing each word as a node and the sequence of words as directed edges, forming a word recurrence graph. The researchers focused on three main attributes of these graphs: repeated edges (RE), largest connected component (LCC), and largest strongly connected component (LSC).
In addition to the narrative tasks, the children underwent three reading performance assessments. These included an eye-tracking text reading task to measure reading speed and comprehension, a single-word reading task to assess reading fluency, and a phonological awareness task to evaluate their ability to identify and manipulate sounds in words. The combination of these assessments provided a comprehensive view of the children’s reading abilities.
Over the school year, the children’s oral narratives showed a decrease in repeated edges and an increase in the complexity of connected components (LCC and LSC). In other words, their stories contained fewer repetitions of the same word associations and demonstrated a greater variety of interconnected words, reflecting a more complex and sophisticated narrative structure. This pattern was particularly evident when comparing data from March to June and from March to October, indicating that the school environment played a crucial role in enhancing narrative complexity.
“The same dynamic change in oral narratives that occurs when a child starts to read, happened in written narratives studying historical books, since Sumeria and Ancient Egypt up to nowadays,” Mota told PsyPost.
One of the most notable findings was the predictive value of narrative complexity for reading performance. The researchers found that higher connectedness in the oral narratives collected in March and June was positively correlated with better performance in phonological awareness, reading comprehension, and word accuracy in October.
Phonological awareness refers to the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds in words, which is fundamental for decoding new words. Reading comprehension is the ability to understand and interpret the meaning of the text. Word accuracy involves correctly identifying and pronouncing written words. This suggests that the way children organize their thoughts into stories can provide early indicators of their reading abilities several months later.
However, the study also found that this association did not extend to reading fluency. Reading fluency is the ability to read text smoothly and quickly with minimal errors. This indicates that while narrative complexity is linked to certain aspects of reading skills, other factors may influence reading fluency. Additionally, the study highlighted that girls generally exhibited higher connectedness in their narratives compared to boys, suggesting potential gender differences in language development.
While the findings are promising, the study has some limitations. The sample consisted of children from high socioeconomic backgrounds, which may not represent the broader population. Future research should include children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to see if the findings hold true across different groups.
“We are now designing tools to track narrative complexity on schools environment to follow language development in time to design pedagogical interventions and to track signs of mental disorders in target ages,” Mota said.
The study, “Speech connectedness predicts reading performance three months in advance: a longitudinal experiment,” was authored by Bárbara Malcorra, Marina Ribeiro, Luísa Jensen, Giovana Gomes, Tamara Meletti, and Natália Bezerra Mota.