Measurement of narrative discourse ability in children with language disorders.

Narratives from three studies differing in subject pools, elicitation procedures, and story content were analyzed using seven variables hypothesized to measure a variety of language abilities used in narrative production. Two questions were addressed: (a) To what extent did multiple variables represent common factors? and (b) To what extent did these variables distinguish children with language disorder from their nondisordered peers? Results indicated that: (a) The seven variables represented two factors; Factor I measured global organization of content (i.e., episode structure), and Factor II measured within- and across-sentence structure (i.e., grammatical sentence structure, within subordinate clause productivity, and textual cohesion), and (b) regardless of study, only the variables representing Factor II were selected as the most effective in predicting group membership.

[1]  B Z Liles,et al.  Story grammar ability in children with and without language disorder: story generation, story retelling, and story comprehension. , 1987, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[2]  Walter Loban,et al.  Language Development: Kindergarten through Grade Twelve. NCTE Committee on Research Report No. 18. , 1976 .

[3]  Michael Halliday,et al.  Cohesion in English , 1976 .

[4]  Walter Kintsch,et al.  Toward a model of text comprehension and production. , 1978 .

[5]  Lee Galda,et al.  Context in Text: The Development of Oral and Written Language in Two Genres. , 1984 .

[6]  Rohe N. Eshbaugh.  Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. , 1971 .

[7]  William J. Griffin,et al.  Syntax of Kindergarten and Elementary School Children: A Transformational Analysis. , 1967 .

[8]  J. Bruner.  Acts of meaning , 1990 .

[9]  M. Halliday,et al.  Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective , 1989 .

[10]  Jacob Cohen,et al.  Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences , 1979 .

[11]  M. J. Norušis,et al.  Spss Advanced Statistics Student Guide , 1990 .

[12]  B. Liles.  Production and comprehension of narrative discourse in normal and language disordered children. , 1985, Journal of communication disorders.

[13]  J. Chall,et al.  A FORMULA FOR PREDICTING READABILITY , 1948 .

[14]  F. P. Roth,et al.  Narrative discourse: spontaneously generated stories of learning-disabled and normally achieving students. , 1986, The Journal of speech and hearing disorders.

[15]  D. McNeill.  Hand and Mind , 1995 .

[16]  M. Pratt,et al.  Organizing Stories: Effects of Development and Task Difficulty on Referential Cohesion in Narrative. , 1985 .

[17]  M. Orsolini.  Episodic structure in children's fantasy narratives: “Breakthrough” to decontextualised discourse , 1990 .

[18]  B. Tabachnick,et al.  Using Multivariate Statistics , 1983 .

[19]  D. Anderson,et al.  Young children's recall and reconstruction of audio and audiovisual narratives. , 1986, Child development.

[20]  T. Bennett-Kastor.  Noun phrases and coherence in child narratives , 1983, Journal of Child Language.

[21]  B. Liles,et al.  Cohesion repairs in the narratives of normal-language and language-disordered school-age children. , 1992, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[22]  M Bamberg,et al.  On the ability to provide evaluative comments: further explorations of children's narrative competencies , 1991, Journal of Child Language.

[23]  B. Liles,et al.  Narrative analysis: clinical applications of story generation and story retelling. , 1989, The Journal of speech and hearing disorders.

[24]  J. Shaver,et al.  Stability of cohesion in the spoken narratives of language-impaired and normally developing school-aged children. , 1991, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[25]  Influence of the medium on children's story apprehension. , 1980 .

[26]  Patricia Baggett.  Structurally equivalent stories in movie and text and the effect of the medium on recall. , 1979 .

[27]  B. Liles.  Cohesion in the narratives of normal and language-disordered children. , 1985, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[28]  B. Liles.  Episode organization and cohesive conjunctives in narratives of children with and without language disorder. , 1987, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[29]  Michael Halliday,et al.  An Introduction to Functional Grammar , 1985 .

[30]  R S Chapman,et al.  Communication breakdowns in normal and language learning-disabled children's conversation and narration. , 1988, The Journal of speech and hearing disorders.

[31]  Nonlinguistic symbolic and conceptual abilities of language-impaired and normally developing children. , 1981, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[32]  D. N. Ripich,et al.  Narrative Abilities of Children with Learning Disabilities and Nondisabled Children , 1988, Journal of learning disabilities.

[33]  J. Klecan-Aker,et al.  A Study of the Syntactic Language Skills of Normal School-Age Children , 1985 .