| The current study investigated the impact of animated visual stimuli compared to static
visual stimuli on story retelling skills of children with language and/or literacy impairments
(LLI), compared to static visual stimuli. The study included 11 children aged 8 to 12 years, who
retold two static short stories and two animated short stories, each accompanied by a verbal
model. The children's narratives were transcribed, coded, and analyzed for narrative
macrostructure and microstructure measures. Specifically, story components, productivity,
complexity, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity were measured and compared across
conditions. The results did not yield significant differences for any of the measures. This may
have been due to the small sample size. However, notable trends were observed. Microstructure
measurements of productivity, accuracy, and lexical diversity indicated a potential benefit of
animation for children with LLI in their language output. Exploratory data analysis of individual
data between the subgroups of children with developmental language disorder (DLD), who had
spoken and written language difficulties, and children with written language disorder (WLD)
only, suggested possible differences between the subgroups. Future research should include a
larger sample size, specifically explore the differences between the subgroups, and investigate
the influence of animation when a verbal model is and is not presented, to better understand the
conditions under which animated stimuli may be most beneficial in language intervention.
Keywords: animation, developmental language disorder, dyslexia, narrative, story retell,
verbal model |