Performance differences between verbally talented preschoolers and their regular counterparts in storytelling

The primary purpose of this study was to compare language and narrative skills of both talented and regular young children in Taiwan. The participants were asked to tell a story based on images in children’s picture books. Twelve children, who participated in a screening session designed to identify young talented children for the Enrichment Program for Cultivating Problem Solving Abilities and Multiple Intelligences for Talented Preschoolers (PSMIGP program), were divided into a verbally talented group (VT) and a regular group (RE). The stories told by the participants were tape-recorded, transcribed, and coded using the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). The results indicated that the verbally talented children demonstrated their linguistic talents at as young as four years of age. In telling a story, they used more clauses and more words that were different to complete the task. In addition, they used more modifiers (i.e. adjectives and adverbs) and employed more conjunctions that were more complex. However, there were no differences between the two groups in mean length of utterance (MLU) and type-token ratios (TTRs). This paper presents a discussion on the implications of this study and offers suggestions for future research.