Discourse Formulation in Children With Closed Head Injury

Abstract

In this study, narrative and expository discourse-retelling abilities were compared in 9 children with closed head injury (CHI) age 9;5-15;3 (years;months) and 9 typically developing age-matched peers. Narrative and expository retellings were analyzed according to language variables (i.e., number of words, number of T-units, and sentential complexity) and information variables (i.e., number of propositions, number of episodic structure elements, and number of global structure elements). A measure of participants' ability to generate a story moral or aim was also taken. The children with CHI differed significantly from their age-matched peers across language and information domains and in their ability to formulate a moral or aim in both the expository and narrative retellings. In addition, differences across genre were found with performance on narrative tasks superior to performance on expository tasks. The exception was that it was easier for participants to generate an aim for the expository passage than a story moral for the narrative passage. The results are discussed relative to a working memory theory of impairment following CHI. Future directions for research are proposed.