Patterns of Discourse Coherence: Variations in Genre Performance in Children with Language Impairment

2008 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn S. Bliss ◽  
Allyssa McCabe
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Random Order ◽  
Routine Activity ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Clinical Assessments ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Procedural Discourse ◽  
Social Communicative

Background: The purpose of this investigation was to compare the discourse coherence of 36 children with language impairment (LI) who produced 3 types of genres: scripts, personal narratives, and procedural discourse. Method: The children described in random order a routine activity, personal experience, and a favorite game. The genres were analyzed for length, syntactic complexity, topic maintenance, informativeness, and fluency. Results: Scripts resulted in short, simple, and fluent utterances. Personal narratives and procedural discourse were similar in their length, informativeness, and fluency. Procedures were more syntactically complex and on topic than personal narratives. Conclusions: Children with LI are influenced by discourse genre. Clinical Implications: Different discourse genres should be compared in clinical assessments. Intervention should include different discourse genres in order to maximize a child's social, communicative, and classroom discourse.

Jumping around and leaving things out: A profile of the narrative abilities of children with specific language impairment

1998 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 647-667 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Elisabeth Miranda ◽  
Allyssa McCabe ◽  
Lynn S. Bliss
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Five Dimensions ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
School Aged Children ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Heavy Burden ◽  
Event Sequencing ◽  
Experimental Group

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the discourse coherence of school-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI). The following dimensions of discourse are analyzed: topic maintenance, event sequencing, explicitness (including referencing), conjunctive cohesion, and fluency. The personal narratives of the children in the experimental group were compared with those produced by two groups of children with normal language development, one group matched by chronological age and the other matched by language level. The narratives of the children with SLI were significantly impaired compared with both control groups with respect to all five dimensions of narration, although impairment was far more pronounced for topic maintenance, event sequencing, and implicitness than it was for conjunctive cohesion or fluency. The former serious impairments place a heavy burden on listeners. Theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed.

Eliciting Verbs From Children With Specific Language Impairment

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Frome Loeb ◽  
Clifton Pye ◽  
Sean Redmond ◽  
Lori Zobel Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Lexical Skills

The focus of assessment and intervention is often aimed at increasing the lexical skills of young children with language impairment. Frequently, the use of nouns is the center of the lexical assessment. As a result, the production of verbs is not fully evaluated or integrated into treatment in a way that accounts for their semantic and syntactic complexity. This paper presents a probe for eliciting verbs from children, describes its effectiveness, and discusses the utility of and problems associated with developing such a probe.

scholarly journals A Narrative Evaluation of Mandarin-Speaking Children With Language Impairment

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Hao ◽  
Li Sheng ◽  
Yiwen Zhang ◽  
Fan Jiang ◽  
Jill de Villiers ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Lexical Diversity ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Narrative Skills ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Ambient Language ◽  
Comparable Performance

Purpose We aimed to study narrative skills in Mandarin-speaking children with language impairment (LI) to compare with children with LI speaking Indo-European languages. Method Eighteen Mandarin-speaking children with LI (mean age 6;2 [years;months]) and 18 typically developing (TD) age controls told 3 stories elicited using the Mandarin Expressive Narrative Test (de Villiers & Liu, 2014). We compared macrostructure-evaluating descriptions of characters, settings, initiating events, internal responses,plans, actions, and consequences. We also studied general microstructure, including productivity, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and grammaticality. In addition, we compared the use of 6 fine-grained microstructure elements that evaluate particular Mandarin linguistic features. Results Children with LI exhibited weaknesses in 5 macrostructure elements, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and 3 Mandarin-specific, fine-grained microstructure elements. Children with LI and TD controls demonstrated comparable performance on 2 macrostructure elements, productivity, grammaticality, and the remaining 3 fine-grained microstructure features. Conclusions Similarities and differences are noted in narrative profiles of children with LI who speak Mandarin versus those who speak Indo-European languages. The results are consistent with the view that profiles of linguistic deficits are shaped by the ambient language. Clinical implications are discussed.

日本語ヴォイス構文の指標的機能と話者の選択

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-73
Author(s):  
Hiroko Otsuka
Keyword(s):  
Research Method ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Language Community ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Discourse Function ◽  
Anthropological Linguistics ◽  
Discourse Coherence

In previous researches Japanese voice constructions were examined as devices for managing discourse coherence by indicating a person as the focus of attention or of spearker’s empathy. However, in that discourse function a speaker cannot choose the function because it is automatically determined by grammatical and cognitive ways. Previous studies rarely studied the context constitutive choice made by a speaker in every actual language use. This paper aims to explain the functions of Japanese voice constructions which can potentially be a set of options for a speaker’s choice in a discourse, and then examines the speaker’s motivation for the choice made. Introspective and intuitive research method is used to explain the set of options and motivations of speaker’s choice, and each set is assumed to be formed paradigmatically based on functional linguistic theory. The functions of constructions are explained as indexical functions which is developed in the theory of anthropological linguistics. Indexical functions examined here are conventional grammatical knowledges shared in a particular language community. The data used are personal narrative ones. Therefore, the speaker’s focus of attention or empathy no longer need to be questioned here, because in the personal narratives the speaker itself is cognitively the focus of attention. The analysis shows that the indexical functions of constructions chosen by the speaker is roughly divided into two types of indexicals, the first is referential indexicals which express the locus of speaker, directionality, causality, and affectedness of actions, evaluative attitudes towards events, social statuses and powers, and mental attitudes. The second is nonreferential indexicals that express socio-cultural attitudes.

Facilitating Peer Interaction

1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela A. Hadley ◽  
C. Melanie Schuele
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Language Intervention ◽  
Clinical Experiences ◽  
Speech Language Pathologists ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Language Objectives ◽  
Socially Relevant ◽  
Social Communicative ◽  
Societal Expectations

Research over the past decade has provided the rationale to target the peer-related social-communicative competence of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Yet our clinical experiences suggest that verbal interaction skills with peers rarely are emphasized in speech/language intervention with these children. We argue that it is particularly important for speech-language pathologists to target socially relevant language objectives with children with SLI because these children eventually must live up to standard societal expectations in social, educational, and vocational settings. In this paper, we identify several barriers that may prevent speech-language pathologists from addressing socially relevant language intervention objectives. Several case examples are provided to illustrate ways in which practitioners can address these types of objectives.

Together They Stand: Interpreting Not-At-Issue Content

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Frazier ◽  
Brian Dillon ◽  
Charles Clifton
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Experimental Confirmation ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Natural Class ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Coherence Relation ◽  
Semantic Properties ◽  
Issue Content

Potts unified the account of appositives, parentheticals, expressives, and honorifics as 'Not- At-Issue’ (NAI) content, treating them as a natural class semantically in behaving like root (unembedded) structures, typically expressing speaker commitments, and being interpreted independently of At-Issue content. We propose that NAI content expresses a complete speech act distinct from the speech act of the containing utterance. The speech act hypothesis leads us to expect the semantic properties Potts established. We present experimental confirmation of two intuitive observations made by Potts: first that speech act adverbs should be acceptable as NAI content, supporting the speech act hypothesis; and second, that when two speech acts are expressed as successive sentences, the comprehender assumes they are related by some discourse coherence relation, whereas an NAI speech act need not bear a restrictive discourse coherence relation to its containing utterance, though overall sentences containing relevant content are rated more acceptable than those that do not. The speech act hypothesis accounts for these effects, and further accounts for why judgments of syntactic complexity or evaluations of whether or not a statement is true interact with the at-issue status of the material being judged or evaluated.

scholarly journals Uskon performatiivit kokemuskerronnassa

Elore ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuija Hovi
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Role Theory ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Word Of Faith ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
Personal Experience Stories ◽  
Faith Movement ◽  
Charismatic Christianity

The article is focused on the construction of a relationship between religious faith and personal narratives. The hypothesis advanced is that the maintenance of religious convictions within charismatic Christianity takes place thorough sharing personal experience stories, in which the course of everyday life is interpreted biblically. The article is based on interview material. The interviewees are members of the Word of Faith congregation in Turku. The congregation represents the Faith Movement originating in North America, which was brought to Finland via Sweden (Livets Ord) at the beginning of the 1990s. The writer combines the ideas of socio-psychology of religion (mainly role theory) and narrative research, which applies the idea of performative speech in speech act theory.

scholarly journals Automated Proposition Density Analysis for Discourse in Aphasia

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (5) ◽  
pp. 1123-1132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davida Fromm ◽  
Joel Greenhouse ◽  
Kaiyue Hou ◽  
G. Austin Russell ◽  
Xizhen Cai ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Peanut Butter ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
The Other ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Pairwise Comparisons ◽  
Large Samples ◽  
Linear Association ◽  
Language Analysis ◽  
Density Analysis ◽  
Procedural Discourse

Purpose This study evaluates how proposition density can differentiate between persons with aphasia (PWA) and individuals in a control group, as well as among subtypes of aphasia, on the basis of procedural discourse and personal narratives collected from large samples of participants. Method Participants were 195 PWA and 168 individuals in a control group from the AphasiaBank database. PWA represented 6 aphasia types on the basis of the Western Aphasia Battery–Revised (Kertesz, 2006). Narrative samples were stroke stories for PWA and illness or injury stories for individuals in the control group. Procedural samples were from the peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich task. Language samples were transcribed using Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (MacWhinney, 2000) and analyzed using Computerized Language Analysis (MacWhinney, 2000), which automatically computes proposition density (PD) using rules developed for automatic PD measurement by the Computerized Propositional Idea Density Rater program (Brown, Snodgrass, & Covington, 2007; Covington, 2007). Results Participants in the control group scored significantly higher than PWA on both tasks. PD scores were significantly different among the aphasia types for both tasks. Pairwise comparisons for both discourse tasks revealed that PD scores for the Broca's group were significantly lower than those for all groups except Transcortical Motor. No significant quadratic or linear association between PD and severity was found. Conclusion Proposition density is differentially sensitive to aphasia type and most clearly differentiates individuals with Broca's aphasia from the other groups.

scholarly journals Narrative Style: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Oral Personal Experience Narratives

sjesr ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-47
Author(s):  
Liaqat Iqbal ◽  
Dr. Ayaz Ahmad ◽  
Mr. Irfan Ullah
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Oral Narratives ◽  
Written Narratives ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Personal Experience Narratives

Personal narrative, a very important subgenre of narratives, is usually developed in a particular style. To know its specificity, in this study, oral personal narratives have been analyzed. For this purpose, twenty oral narratives, collected from twenty students of BS English, have been analyzed. In order to understand the macrostructure, i.e., narrative categories, Labov’s (1972) model of sociolinguist features of narratives has been used. For the analysis of microstructures, Halliday’s and Hasan’s (1976) five key cohesive ties: references, conjunction, substitution, ellipses, and lexical ties have been used. It was found that with little variations, most of the personal experience oral narratives follow the Labov’s structure of narrative analysis, i.e., abstract, orientation, complicating actions, resolution, evaluation, and coda. Likewise, while doing microanalysis, it was found that the narratives were well-compact with the help of elements of cohesive ties. The study shows that oral personal experience narratives can have the same structure as those of written narratives.

scholarly journals Spontaneous language markers of Spanish language impairment

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
GABRIELA SIMON-CEREIJIDO ◽  
VERA F. GUTIÉRREZ-CLELLEN
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Complexity Measures ◽  
Spontaneous Language ◽  
Model Combining ◽  
Verb Argument Structure ◽  
Morphology Model ◽  
Language Measures ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance

Spanish-speaking (SS) children with language impairment (LI) present with deficits in morphology and verb argument structure. These language areas may be useful for clinical identification of affected children. This study aimed to evaluate the discrimination accuracy of spontaneous language measures with SS preschoolers to tease out what combination of grammatical measure(s) were responsible for the LI deficits, and to determine the role of verb argument structure and syntactic complexity in identifying SS children with LI. Two sets of experiments were conducted on the spontaneous language samples of SS preschoolers with and without LI using discriminant function analyses. The study found that (a) mean length of utterance in words (MLUW) and ungrammaticality index in combination are fair to good discriminators of preschoolers with LI; (b) a morphology model combining correct use of articles, verbs, and clitics fairly discriminates LI children but may miss children whose language has limited syntactic complexity; and (c) semantic–syntactic complexity measures, such as MLUW, theme argument omissions, and ditransitive verb use, should be considered in the assessment of Spanish LI. The children who were bilingual and Spanish dominant in the study were classified as accurately as the Spanish-only children.

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