Cohesion in the Narratives of Normal and Language-Disordered Children

Abstract

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.

Narrative competence among hearing-impaired and normal-hearing children: analytical cross-sectional study

“…These differences in narrative performance corroborate previous findings among hearing-impaired individuals 18 and other studies comparing individuals with language disorders and those without hearing impairment. 3,9,22 The directly proportional association between age and the use of complicating actions in narratives is consistent with the findings of a previous study on children aged 7-8 years 24 that found a strong association between age and cognitive and language measurements.…”

“…1,2 Narratives provide a rich linguistic context and have been used to evaluate the linguistic development of individuals with different health conditions that may be associated with language disorders. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] The interplay of hearing and language has a key role in ensuring quality of oral narrative as an expression of thought. Lack of access to appropriate and reliable instruments for evaluation of linguistic potential among hearing-impaired children may interfere with adequate speech and language therapy planning and thus compromise the effectiveness of speech-language interventions.…”

“…Other authors have demonstrated lower use of cohesion elements in oral narratives among hearing-impaired individuals. 18 Studies on other populations 3,4,9,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28] have also indicated that there is lower use of cohesion elements among individuals with language disorders.…”

“…Difficulties in using connectives may be associated with relational abnormalities and difficulties in integrating relationships with meanings, thereby resulting in separation of the story's organization from the use of cohesion elements. 3,22 Hearing-impaired children show delayed use of temporal/spatial notions in sentences, compared with normal-hearing children. 21 In addition, semantic abnormalities seen in cases of hearing impairment 16 may have contributed towards poor performance in the cohesion score.…”

Assessment of Structure Dependent Narrative Features in Modeled Contexts: African American and European American Children

“…Each narrative was coded for cohesive adequacy (Liles, 1985;Halliday & Hasan 1976) by identifying categories of cohesive markers and determining whether or not they were clear (unambiguous) or unclear (ambiguous) following procedures outlined by Strong (1998). Unambiguous cohesive markers were coded when no further information was necessary to determine the cross-C-unit referent (e.g., /One day John saw the aliens//and he was scared/).…”