The purpose of the present study was to compare narrative abilities of learning disabled and nondisabled students across four story difficulty levels and across three vocabulary age groups. Independent variables to be studied included story events correct, story structures, propositions, and cohesive devices. Results indicated that the students with learning disabilities were generally able to reconstruct stories as well as nondisabled students. However, significant differences were shown between groups within each level of analysis. Developmental differences in performance were evident on all measures and the use of line drawings appeared to have a negative influence on recall for all subjects. The self-generated story students were told to produce to accompany line drawings appeared less well constructed than the retold stories, except for the Internal Response category. Specific patterns were demonstrated in the retold and self-generated narratives assessment of children with learning disabilities and nondisabled children. Narrative abilities appear to offer useful information regarding language skills beyond the sentence level.

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This study investigated the ability of children with specific learning disabilities (SLD), children with language impairments (LI), and children who are normally achieving (NA) to recall the events and story structures of a narrative and an expository text. Effects of group, verbal age, text structure, and order of presentation on recall as measured through listening comprehension were studied. Sixty students who were matched on verbal age served as subjects. Results suggested differences between the LI and SLD groups on text recall. Differences were also evident for text type, with recall of narrative text typically being superior to recall of expository text. In general, the performance of the group with SLD was similar to that of the NA group.

Three groups of subjects differing in age, language experience, and familiarity with American Sign Language were compared on three tasks regarding the perception of iconicity in signs from American Sign Language. Subjects were asked to guess the meaning of signs, to rate signs for iconicity, and to state connections between signs and their meaning in English. Results showed that hearing college students, deaf adults, and hearing first-grade children perform similarly on tasks regarding iconicity. Results suggest a psycholinguistic definition of iconicity based on association values, rather than physical resemblances between signs and real-world referents.

Two linguistic microstructures, propositions and cohesive devices, were analyzed in story recalls by 11 primary and intermediate level hearing-impaired students. The students were enrolled in total communication, public day classes, and had severe-to-profound hearing losses. Four story conditions were presented: (1) easy structure-T.C.; (2) complex structure-T.C.; (3) complex structure with pictures-T.C.; and (4) create-a-story-pictures. Students watched and then retold or made up a story to a friend. Recalls were videotaped and transcribed by a deaf adult and the first investigator. Recalls of hearing-impaired students were significantly shorter than those found earlier for hearing students. When stories are very simple, hearing-impaired students generate mostly complete propositions, however as complexity increases, semantic errors result in fewer complete propositions.