Does the narrative ability during retelling differ in 5-year-olds born with and without unilateral cleft lip and palate?

Background: A previous study has indicated poorer narrative ability during retelling in 5-year-olds with unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) as a group, compared to peers without UCLP.

Aim: To investigate if there are any differences between 5-year-olds with and without UCLP in narrative ability during retelling.

Methods: A total of 83 children participated, 51 with UCLP and 32 without. They had no known additional malformations or syndromes. The children were audio recorded while performing the Bus Story Test (BST). The recordings were orthographically transcribed. From the transcriptions the BST information score was calculated. The macrostructure of the narratives was assessed with the Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS), and the microstructure with mean length of utterance in words, grammaticality, grammatical complexity and lexical diversity. Results for children with and without UCLP were compared.

Results: The group with UCLP performed better than the group without UCLP in the NSS sub-category Conclusion. No other significant differences were seen between the groups. The UCLP group had a larger standard deviation for the information score than the group without UCLP.

Conclusions: The group with UCLP displayed at least as good results as the group without UCLP, but the information score was more varied for the UCLP group than for the group without UCLP.