Discourse Formulation in Children With Closed Head Injury

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.

The Performance of Younger and Older Adults With Retardation on a Series of Language Tasks

Three experiments were performed with groups of persons with mild to moderate levels of retardation between the ages of 20 to 36 and 55 to 77 years. The ability of these subjects to perform language tasks with heavy processing demands was examined. These tasks included following syntactically complex directions, recalling facts from an expository passage (fact recall), and retelling a narrative passage (story recall). The abilities of subjects in the two groups were examined and performance was compared. It was found that the performance of the subjects did not differ on two of the three tasks. The younger subjects performed significantly better than the older subjects on only the fact recall task.

Vocabulary Difficulty, Prior Knowledge, and Text Comprehension

In order to examine the relative importance of vocabulary difficulty and prior knowledge to the comprehension of a narrative passage taken from a social studies text, 61 sixth graders were given either an easy vocabulary or a difficult vocabulary version of a text. They also were given either relevant or irrelevant preinstruction about the culture described in the text. Both vocabulary difficulty and type of preinstruction had significant effects on comprehension, but the two effects did not significantly interact, partially replicating the findings of Freebody and Anderson (1983b). The results indicate that knowledge-based preinstruction can significantly improve comprehension of a text written about an unfamiliar topic but cannot compensate for the effects of text difficulty in itself.

Effect of Semantic Context on Free Recall of Serial Lists

The role of semantic context as a basis for organization was examined by presenting subjects with a serial list of 30 nouns in three different contexts: (a) embedded within a narrative passage having a single semantic theme; (b) embedded within a randomly ordered list of the words contained in the narrative passage; (c) presented with no additional context cues. Results showed that both over-all recall performance and input-output consistency were poorer in the random context than in the other two and that other organizational measures were not highly associated with recall performance. It was concluded that (a) subjects attend to context when organizing serial lists and (b) optimal recall was obtained when subjects' organization was related to order of input.

Children's Comprehension of Time-Compressed Speech: Effect of Speaker's Familiarity

An experiment was conducted with 42 third grade children from a parochial school system in a large metropolitan area. 21 classmates whose teacher served as the speaker for this experiment comprised the experimental group. A matched group of 21 classmates from another third grade classroom formed the control group. Each subject individually listened to a 940-word narrative passage that had been compressed at a rate of 45% or 275 words per minute. 10 questions about the material presented in the final three-fourths of the passage were asked of the subjects. The difference between the mean number of correct responses produced by the experimental group (5.5) and the control group (4.9) was not statistically significant. The results indicate that familiarity with the speaker does not facilitate 8-yr.-olds' comprehension of time-compressed speech.