This study compared story retelling skills of 50 children with ADHD (ages 8–12, DSM-5-TR criteria) vs. 46 neurotypical (NT) peers across two conditions: with and without visual story cues (Aesop's fables), coding narratives on structure, fluency, and linguistic accuracy.
Children with ADHD produced shorter, less complete, and less coherent stories with higher rates of pauses, self-interruptions, repetitions, and linguistic errors (referencing, cohesion, semantic/morphosyntactic, phonological) than NT peers. Visual cues improved performance in both groups, with larger effects on informativeness and coherence for the ADHD group; however, cues did not normalize ADHD performance to NT levels.
- Stories were short and simply structured, risking ceiling effects on some variables. - The bespoke narrative task is unnormed, preventing determination of clinical impairment thresholds. - No standardized narrative measure was included for external validity comparison.
Include narrative assessment—covering structure, fluency, and linguistic accuracy—as part of comprehensive evaluations for children with ADHD. Clinicians, educators, and caregivers should use sequential visual cues (e.g., story pictures) to support narrative organization in children with ADHD, particularly for improving story completeness and coherence.
