Narrative skill and testimonial accuracy in typically developing children and those with intellectual disabilities
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Authors
Brown, Deirdre
Brown, Emma-Jayne
Lewis, Charlie N
Lamb, Michael E
Publication Date
2018Journal Title
Applied Cognitive Psychology
ISSN
1099-0720
Publisher
Wiley-Blackwell
Volume
32
Issue
5
Pages
550-560
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
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Brown, D., Brown, E., Lewis, C. N., & Lamb, M. E. (2018). Narrative skill and testimonial accuracy in typically developing children and those with intellectual disabilities. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32 (5), 550-560. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3427
Abstract
Children must describe maltreatment coherently for their testimony to be influential in court. We know little about how well children with intellectual disabilities (CWID) describe their experiences relative to typically developing (TD) children, despite CWID’s vulnerability to maltreatment. We investigated children’s reports of an experienced event and compared coherence in CWID (mild to moderate impairment: 7-11 years) with TD children matched for mental (4-10 years) or chronological age (7-11 years). All children included important markers of narrative coherence in their reports. Children with lower mental ages, particularly those with an intellectual disability, included fewer markers of narrative coherence in their reports than children with higher mental ages. Individual markers of narrative coherence, particularly recall of content, predicted accuracy of testimony and resistance to suggestion even when disability and mental age were taken into account. These findings highlight the importance of helping children to describe their experiences coherently.
Keywords
children, coherence, eyewitness testimony, intellectual disability, narrative quality
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3427
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/286967
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International, Attribution 4.0 International
Licence URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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