A COMPARISON OF TEXT CHARACTERISTICS IN THE NARRATIVE DISCOURSE OF NORMAL AND LEARNING DISABLED CHILDREN (COHESION, PROCESSING, COHESIVE HARMONY, LINGUISTIC, LANGUAGE DISORDERS)

The oral and written narrative constructions of normal and learning disabled children were examined for several text characteristics representing different levels of semantic structure. Sixty children divided into three groups comprised the research sample. Twenty normal children (N), 20 low verbal learning disabled children (LV) and 20 equal or higher verbal learning disabled children (EHV), 10 each from grade levels 3-4th and 5-6th were asked to construct oral and written stories. The stories were coded using cohesive tie analysis, cohesive harmony analysis and narrative level analysis. Multivariate and univariate statistical procedures were employed to ascertain main effects of group, grade level and mode (oral and written) for measures of productivity, syntactical maturity, cohesion, cohesive harmony and narrative level.;A major conclusion of the present study was that subgroup delineation by verbal ability rather than the overriding learning disabled label was a more important contributor to children's narrative text-characteristics differentiation. That is, LV children appeared to experience significant difficulty in constructing narratives when compared to their more adept EHV and N peers. Although EHV children were also observed to experience less maturity in narrative construction, their differences from the N children were not as pronounced. Finally, the three analysis methods utilized in the present study appeared to describe narrative text characteristics from varying and informative perspectives.;Results indicated that the three groups of children differed most strongly on those measures of semantic analysis which assess the mid-level (cohesive harmony) and the deep level (narrative levels) of semantic structure. Productivity measures also differentiated groups. Group and grade-level effects for surface-level semantic structures (cohesion) did not materialize. However, a grade effect occurred in that younger children demonstrated less syntactic maturity than older children. A mode effect for productivity measures revealed that children use significantly more words in their oral constructions than in their written constructions.