Investigating the Narrative Skills of Late Talkers Through SequentialPicture Stories

Objectives: the purpose of the present study was to investigate the abnormalities observed in the oralnarrative skills of late talkers mostly caused by mental disorders while they try to comprehend a wordlesssequential picture story to create and narrate the relevant story.methods: totally 15 (10 male and 5 female) individuals were selected based on the purposive sampling.the participants were the students of a specialized school for physically and mentally retarded students.they were the students of grade one ranging in age from 6 to 13. all of them had language delay whichwas caused by mental disorder. their narrations were observed and recorded in a semi natural setting bythe researchers and their speech therapist.results: based on the data collected from the interview tackled by the researchers it was concluded thatmost of the students were not able to keep the sequence while narrating the picture.discussion: with regard to syntactic patterns, all of the sentences were holophrastic or two-wordutterances bearing a simple structure although some exceptions were noticed. an element which wasmostly seen in the participants was their inability to name the objects because of their restricted lexicon;therefore they compensated this shortage through trying to define the function of the words they wantedto utter.