The study reported in this article examined the impact of task type on the ways in which learners resolve grammatical language-related episodes (LREs) and whether the level of engagement affects subsequent language development. Data were collected over a six-week period. Thirty-two Iranian second language (L2) learners were paired up to complete a…

Narrative discourse is an essential component of day-to-day communication, but little is known about narrative in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson's disease (PD), Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We performed a detailed analysis of a semi-structured speech sample in 32 non-aphasic…

Presents an analysis of prose narratives that allows content to be identified as central and provides a priori rationale for why the content is central. Investigates which content is supportive of, or distracting to, the central content. (FL)

An experiment was carried out to examine individual story schemata and a story theory. The theory proposed relating structural characteristics of narratives to the reader's affective response and the reader's intuitions about what constitutes a story. Two levels of narrative structure are distinguished by the theory: the chronological sequence of…

Discusses two sets of neurological case histories: A. R. Luria's "The Man with a Shattered World," and Oliver Sack's "Awakenings." Argues that these histories display two paradigmatic explanations for the mind/brain relation, and that the movement from one paradigm to another also necessitates a movement to different forms of…

A study was conducted to determine the role of story grammar in children's ability to detect misplaced information in simple narratives. The subjects, 27 second grade and 25 fifth grade students, each read six stories that had been developed for the study. The stories were one-episode narratives comprised of six grammatical categories with two…

Both normal (N=19) and language-disordered (N=19) 7- to 10 year-olds used a higher rate of acceptable departures (during recall of text) from the original meaning than any other type of departure with normal children, producing a higher rate of acceptable departures. Both groups repaired fewer unacceptable grammatical departures than unacceptable…

Explores whether children acquire semantic structures from early book reading experiences by examining similarities between discourse structures of stories read to and written by two small children. The generative relationship of prototypic and derived stories is demonstrated by the high correspondence between both constituent structure and…

Reports the results of a study showing that one stylistic feature, the inclusion of connectives other than "and/then" is a good predictor of explanation in five- to ten-year-olds, but a straightforward lack of linguistic resources is not necessarily what limits older children's achievement of explanatory narrative. (HTH)

Thematization, the relative frequency of a discourse referent, and topicalization are conceptualized as related discourse functions. In a probe recall experiment, a word with a thematized referent was a better recall probe than a word with a nonthematized referent. Also, an agent noun was a better prompt than a recipient, and this semantic…

Concludes that children could attend to texts selectively when reading or listening to expository prose, and when reading, but not in listening to narrative prose. (FL)

Argues that many interventions for introducing Aboriginal children to literacy continue to be based on "language deficit" models. Examines whether there is indeed a mismatch between the nonstandard spoken language of some Aboriginal children and textbook language. (RAE)

A study examined the concept of the universality or the cultural specificity of the ideal story structure using the J. M. Mandler and N. S. Johnson story grammar. Specifically, the study tested the effect of two different story structures, one a conventional fairy tale and the other a Cree Indian narrative, on the recall of Cree Indian children.…

Investigates target language variability between speaking and writing in the second language acquisition of non-native English speakers. Results reveal that as narrators advance in English proficiency, they develop more abstract content and reported style in speech and writing and that speech and writing become more interactive. (28 references)…

This volume brings together the majority of lectures and papers presented at the 1998 and 1999 discourse symposia at Vaxjo University. Part one, "Four Perspectives on Discourse," offers a matrix perspective on narrative, a cross cultural perspective on academic rhetoric, a cognitive perspective on informational discourse, and a construction…