The children's use of cohesion in spoken narratives was compared across three groups of children all between seven and 10 years old: normal, language disordered with good story comprehension, and language disordered with poor story comprehension. Good comprehending language disordered and normal children used similar linguistic cohesive…

Among results of a comparison of 20 language disordered and 20 control children (ages 7-10) were that only the nonhandicapped children changed the number of complete episodes narrated as a function of the listener's shared information, while neither group altered the accuracy of conjunctive use as a function of the listener. (Author/DB)

Twenty language-disordered and 20 nonimpaired children, aged 9-11, performed story generation and story retelling tasks. For both groups, retold narratives were longer and contained more story grammar components and complete episode structures. Clause length differentiated story generation from story retelling for the language-disordered children…

Self-initiated repairs produced by 14 normal-language and 14 language-disordered children (ages 8-12) during a story retelling task are described. No group differences were found for grammatical repairs, text meaning repairs, or cohesive repairs relating to text meaning. Differences were significant for success of cohesive repair attempts and…

This review of the literature on narrative discourse in children with language disorders describes theoretical perspectives on narrative use; surveys researchers' rationales for the investigation of narrative ability, including the pragmatic nature of narrative use and narrative ability as an index of language development; discusses methodological…

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…

Narratives from three studies were analyzed using seven variables hypothesized to measure a variety of language abilities used in narrative production. Results indicated that the variables represented global organization of content, and within- and across-sentence structure. Variables representing sentence structure were most effective as…