Non-narrative Discourse Research Articles

Developmental changes in narrative and non-narrative discourse in children with and without brain injury

This study presents a set of narrative and non-narrative tasks and analytic procedures for examining the discourse development of children with perinatal brain injury and typically developing children. Three oral discourse genres were collected at ages 5, 6, and 7: script, picture description, and replica play narration. Genre performances were assessed for the presence of hypothesized genre features. Results suggest these tasks and procedures are able to characterize development in discourse abilities for both a normative group and for children with perinatal brain injury. The group of children with brain injury produced shorter discourse performances with more off-task talk. This group also showed difficulty in fully differentiating the various genre types and in creating integrated discourse performances. However, most of these children demonstrated considerable growth in control of genre features over this time period. The possible utility of these tasks and procedures for clinical assessment is discussed.

Language and cognitive processes from a developmental perspective

Abstract This study concerns children's use of cohesive devices in discourse production. A distinction is drawn between 'coherence', the focus of work by story grammarians, and 'cohesion', a more strictly linguistic problem which holds for narrative and non-narrative discourse. The analysis not only covers changes in surface output, but focuses on underlying representations with respect to changes in the organization of linguistic entries in memory outside input-output relations, changes in the internal processes which constrain production of discourse during input-output relations, and the relationship between these two aspects of the development of cohesion.

Linguistic and social constraints on storytelling

Remarkably consistent patterns of linguistic structuring are a surface feature of everyday oral stories. In this paper, I concentrate on the types of information found in all story texts (Event, Durative-Descriptive, and Evaluative) and the linguistic encoding and necessary inter-relationships which obtain among these information types. The social constraints imposed by the demands for appropriate behavior placed on speaker and hearer by the socially constructed situation of a conversational storytelling are also explored. The temporal semantic distinction between State and Event is shown to be basic to narrative vs. non-narrative discourse. Various narrative genres are described and distinctions are made between past/present/future and hypothetical narratives; specific and generic narratives; and “stories” and “reports” both in respect to the encoding each receives in English language discourse and the semantic interpretation accorded the various clauses which make up the text. Finally, the constraints on “storyworthiness” of narratable incidents are shown to depend on the degree of relevance to the “business at hand” in the interaction which the speaker can demonstrate through his telling.