A study is made of the stretching and distortion of material line elements in turbulence both analytically and numerically. Approximations for the statistics of these processes derived by perturbative expansions are tested by comparison with dynamical simulations in two dimensions. An integral time scale associated with the Lagrangian statistics of the velocity gradients plays a key role in the approximations. A rough estimation of the time scale is obtained by a dynamical short-time analysis by making use of the Navier-Stokes equation.