Narratives from three studies differing in subject pools, elicitation procedures, and story content were analyzed using seven variables hypothesized to measure a variety of language abilities used in narrative production. Two questions were addressed: (a) To what extent did multiple variables represent common factors? and (b) To what extent did these variables distinguish children with language disorder from their nondisordered peers? Results indicated that: (a) The seven variables represented two factors; Factor I measured global organization of content (i.e., episode structure), and Factor II measured within- and across-sentence structure (i.e., grammatical sentence structure, within subordinate clause productivity, and textual cohesion), and (b) regardless of study, only the variables representing Factor II were selected as the most effective in predicting group membership.
An adaptation of Halliday and Hasan's (1976) description of cohesion in English was applied to the spoken narratives of normal and language-disordered children. Three major questions were addressed: (a) the influence of the nonlinguistic environment on the use of cohesion, (b) the nature of language disorder as displayed in the use of cohesion, and (c) the relationship between comprehension and use of cohesion. Twenty normal and 20 language-disordered children, aged 7:6–10:6, were included in the study. Each child produced two narratives, one for an adult listener who saw a movie with the child and one who had not. Results indicate that both groups of subjects altered their use of cohesion as a function of the listener's needs in the same way. However, the normal and language-disordered subjects differed in their manner of cohesive organization, their cohesive adequacy, and their comprehension of the story.
This review and analysis of the literature on narrative discourse in children places particular emphasis on children with language disorder. The review (a) describes theoretical perspectives on narrative use, (b) surveys researchers’ rationales for the investigation of narrative ability, (c) discusses methodological issues relevant to narrative research, and (d) concludes with a discussion regarding future research. Specific topics contained within these discussions include contributions from allied disciplines, the pragmatic nature of narrative use, narrative ability as an index of language development, methodological issues in research design, and clinical implications of future research.
Stories were elicited under two conditions--story retelling and story generation--from a group of 23 normal young adults and 4 closed head-injured (CHI) adults who had reached a high level of language recovery. Sentence production, intersentential cohesion, and story grammar were analyzed. The results demonstrated that the two elicitation tasks differentially influenced the performance of both normal and CHI subjects at all levels of analysis, and the two groups differed in the cohesive and story grammar measures only in the story generation task. It is concluded that comparing performance across tasks of story retelling and story generation is a useful procedure for characterizing the discourse problems of CHI subjects with recovery of high-level language skills.
Preliminary findings from an ongoing investigation of the potential relationship between narrative discourse performance and executive functions in adults with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are reported. Narrative stories were elicited from 32 adults with TBI. Stories were analysed at three levels: sentence production, intersentential cohesive adequacy, and story episode structure. These measures were then correlated with scores from the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), the primary measure of executive function. A significant correlation was noted between a factor score from the WCST and the measure of story structure, but not sentence production or cohesive adequacy. These results suggest that executive functions may be a promising avenue to pursue in the search for underlying causal factors of narrative discourse dysfunction and, therefore to better delineate the nature of communicative deficits secondary to TBI.
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