Abstract

Narratives have traditionally been defined as stories about real or fictional events. Several studies have reported that children with Specific Language Impairment have problems in their narrative abilities, both at a comprehensive and productive level. However, most of these studies have been carried out in preschoolers or in children in the first years of schooling and it is unknown if these difficulties remain in subsequent years. The purpose of this research was to describe the narrative performance of a group of 10-year-old children with SLI and typical development and compare it with the one they exhibited at age 5.18 students with a history of SLI and 23 with typical development participated in this research. Each participant carried out a retelling task of the text “The sheep and the alien”. Each text was transcribed and analyzed through the application of the narrative complexity index of Petersen, Gillam and Gillam, adapted by Crespo et al.. The results revealed that time has an effect on narrative complexity for most of the criteria studied in both groups. Secondly, that the differences observed between the DT and SLI groups at 5 years are not maintained at 10 years and that there is a moderating effect of the fixed factor on the within-subject factor in the Temporal Markers criterion of the ICN-A. The results are discussed in light of the proposals on the evolution of the SLI.