Spontaneously generated narratives of children treated for posterior fossa tumour

Performance on creative narrative tasks of children treated for acute lymphocytic leukaemia

“…The finding of large standard deviations is similar to those of both Jordan et a/. (1991) and Hudson and Murdoch (1992), and suggests that there may be a wide range of what can be considered normal narrative. This highlights the need for empirical data of large groups of normally achieving children.…”

“…However, only 12 of the 23 control subjects, and only five of the 23 ALL subjects, generated true narratives. A similar finding disparity between Applebee's statement regarding the age of acquisition of true narrative and actual performance of children being tested was reported by Hudson and Murdoch (1992).…”

“…This finding is similar to that of Jordan et a/. (1991), but contrasts with findings of other researchers (Hudson and Murdoch 1992, Liles et a/. 1989, Olley 1989, who reported that their impaired groups had fewer complete ties than their controls.…”

“…Similar negative outcomes for spontaneously generated narratives have been reported by Jordan e t a/. (1991) for a group of children following closed-head injury, and also by Hudson and Murdoch (1992) for a group of children with posterior fossa tumours. In a study examining story-recall abilities of normal and severely disabled readers, Weaver and Dickinson (1982) found story grammar did not differentiate between the groups, and concluded that story grammars may be of limited diagnostic utility to distinguish between good and poor readers.…”

“…Using this definition of a sentence as a guideline, more specific rules were devised by Jordan et a/. (1991) and Hudson and Murdoch (1992) to clarify the delineation of units that will henceforward be referred to as propositions (see Appendix A). These rules have been employed by Jordan et al (1991) and Hudson and Murdoch (1992) for the analysis of narrative tasks of children with closed-head injury and posterior fossa brain tumours, respectively.…”