Departures in the spoken narratives of normal and language-disordered children

Abstract

The spoken narratives of 38 normal and language-disordered children (CA 7;6–10;6) were analyzed by describing their departures from the original text during recall. The narrative texts were presented to an adult listener following each child's viewing of a 35-minute film. The following departure types were compared across groups: (a) acceptable departures from the original text meaning, (b) unacceptable departures from the original text meaning, (c) grammatical departures (i.e., agrammatical utterances), (d) exact repetitions of words or phrases, (e) unacceptable departures from the text's meaning correctly repaired, (f) unacceptable departures from the text meaning incorrectly repaired, (g) departures from text meaning left unrepaired, and (h) repaired grammatical departures. Results indicated that both groups used a higher rate of acceptable departures from the original text meaning than any other departure type, with the normal children producing a higher rate of acceptable departures and a lower rate of unacceptable grammatical departures. Both groups repaired fewer unacceptable grammatical departures than unacceptable departures from text meaning. The groups did not differ in their tendency to ignore grammatical departures. Implications for language processing in narrative discourse are discussed.

Personal Narratives of Students With and Without Learning Disabilities

“…Consistent with this suggestion, girls with LD in this study, as compared to boys with LD, displayed significantly less-developed expressive semantic abilities (see "Participants' Structural Language Skills" section, above), were more likely to have deficits in processing auditory information (71 percent of girls; 47 percent of boys), and demonstrated less overall verbal productiv-ity during the conversational narrating (see "Procedure" section, above). This co-occurrence of less-developed language skills and poorer narrative performance in girls with LD in this study is in line with previous findings on the relationship among children's impaired language skills and various aspects of narrative performance, such as inferencing from narratives (Crais & Chapman, 1987), comprehension of narrative structure (Liles, 1985), and amount and accuracy of narrative recall (Copmann & Griffith, 1994;Liles & Purcell, 1987;Weaver & Dickinson, 1979).…”

‘Once upon a ribbit’: Stories narrated by autistic children

“…Studies of narrative abilities have been conducted with a variety of clinical populations, including children with learning disabilities (Feagans & Short, 1984;Roth & Spekman, 1986;Weaver & Dickinson, 1979), specific language impairment (Liles & Purcell, 1987;Merritt & Liles, 1989;Sleight & Print, 1985), mental retardation (Hemphill et af., 1991;Kernan & Sabsay, 1982Nwokah, 1982;Reilly et al, 1990) and autism (Baron- Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1986;Loveland, McEvoy, Tunali & Kelley, 1990). One reason for studying narrative in these populations is that it is a particularly sensitive tool for identifying discourse problems that may not be captured on standardized language tests.…”

A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Narrative Language Abilities in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

“…Cohesion: Cohesion relates to linguistic structures that link sentences together (Norbury & Bishop, 2003) and has primarily been operationalized as ambiguous references (also referred to as withinclause errors). Adequate referencing of events and characters clarify to the listener how characters, events, and ideas in a story are related (Liles & Purcell, 1987;Wigglesworth, 1990). Though cohesion and coherence (see above) are related, the two are traditionally viewed as distinct categories (Karmiloff-Smith, 1985).…”