Development of early narrative skills

Definition and characteristics

Once the child achieves a MINIMUM COMMUNICATION CIRCUIT based on the development of the seven basic speech acts assessed with ICRA-A Battery, the pragmatic assessment continues, now at discourse level, by focusing on the NARRATIVE SPEECH ACT (Abraham & Brenca, 2016). With this goal in mind the ICRA-N (Communicative Competence Research for Narrative Speech Acts Production by its acronym in Spanish) Battery was developed.

ICRA-N Battery is supported by pragmatic linguistic concepts (Wittgenstein, 1922; van Dijk, 1978; Halliday & Hassan, 1978; Austin, 1962; Bruner, 1983; Grice, 1975), especially by those of cohesion and discourse coherence.

It consists of instruments built ad hoc to assess the early descriptive, narrative and conversational skills within neurolinguistic speech and language assessment.

This battery makes it possible to perform a quantitative and qualitative systematic analysis, of these skills with a progression criterion.

It contributes to:

1) Making early differential diagnoses in language and communication pathology.
2) Outlining linguistic-pragmatic therapeutic goals in order to develop a MINIMUM NARRATIVE CIRCUIT.