Coherence in child language narratives: a case study of annotation and automatic prediction of coherence

Coherence is an important aspect of language ability. In this study, we analyze and annotate child language samples of story retell sessions for coherence and presence of narrative structure and narrative quality constructs. We use these constructs as features and use existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to build models that automatically predict coherence and language impairment in narratives. Our feature analysis results give us an insight into some of the important narrative quality features such as the use of cognitive inferences and social engagement devices. Our study shows that modeling of coherence in the context of language development in children is promising.