The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children's narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax,…

This study examined how children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS; ages 8 years, 0 months [8;0]-14;5) used referential devices (determiners and pronouns), tense, and connectives to create cohesion in oral narratives based on a storybook compared to typically developing mentally and chronologically age-matched children. WS children used…

The tracking of entities in discourse is known to be a bimodal phenomenon. Speakers achieve cohesion in speech by alternating between full lexical forms, pronouns, and zero anaphora as they track referents. They also track referents in co-speech gestures. In this study, we explored how viewpoint is deployed in reference tracking, focusing on…

Traditionally, at universities, English as a foreign language instructors have used a series of approaches to teach students how to write academic texts in English from both teacher preparation and regular programs. In spite of this, students continue to have problems writing the academic texts required of them in the different courses. Concerned…

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often show impaired linguistic and/or narrative abilities. The present study aimed to document the features of narrative discourse impairment in a group of adults with TBI. 14 severe TBI non-aphasic speakers (GCS less than 8) in the phase of neurological stability and 14 neurologically intact participants…

Short-term stability of cohesion scores for spoken narratives of 39 language-impaired and 39 normally developing elementary-aged children was investigated. Mean cohesive adequacy scores were stable across narratives, but stability coefficients were only moderately large. Results also indicated that stability increases as children gained experience…

Explores four views of the role of interclausal connectives as a set of linguistic devices that help the reader interpret a narrative text. Finds that interclausal connectives carry meaning, connect textual meaning at both local and global levels, and mark discourse continuity and discontinuity both in the text and as inferred by the reader. (SR)

Based on the theory that a story's coherence depends directly on the causal cohesiveness of the story's individual events, this paper describes (1) a process by which readers use causal reasoning to connect events, (2) what memory representations result from this reasoning, and (3) the implications of test data on causal reasoning. Following a…

This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the historical present tense (HP) in English. The tokens of HP in narrative clauses, such as "he's smiling, an' he picks up the card," are referentially equivalent to their past tense alternants in the phrases, "he was smiling an' he picked up the card." Previous…

Describes a psycholinguistic investigation of children's competence in the production of extended discourse, concentrating on discourse form (narrative versus expository) and production modality (written versus spoken). (SKC)

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)

Examination of syntactic complexity in the movie retellings of 77 elementary school-age Spanish-speaking children revealed developmental differences in the length of T-units, index of subordination, use of relative clauses, and prepositional phrases. Analysis underscores the significance of subordination as a cohesive device and as an indicator of…

A computer program devised to analyze text by the use of case grammar is described. The program tests a text against the expectations created by a narrative situation and by the connotative values in the narrator's choice of words. It determines spatial concepts attached to various English words and analyzes the spatial relationships in syntactic…

Presents sample passages from children's readers to show deficiencies in the coherence of such texts, particularly in the way they relate to accompanying illustrations. (GT)