title: Measurement of narrative discourse ability in children with language disorders.
abstract: Narratives from three studies differing in subject pools, elicitation procedures, and story content were analyzed using seven variables hypothesized to measure a variety of language abilities used in narrative production. Two questions were addressed: (a) To what extent did multiple variables represent common factors? and (b) To what extent did these variables distinguish children with language disorder from their nondisordered peers? Results indicated that: (a) The seven variables represented two factors; Factor I measured global organization of content (i.e., episode structure), and Factor II measured within- and across-sentence structure (i.e., grammatical sentence structure, within subordinate clause productivity, and textual cohesion), and (b) regardless of study, only the variables representing Factor II were selected as the most effective in predicting group membership.
authors.affiliation: University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA.
authors.forename: B Z
authors.initials: BZ
authors.lastname: Liles
authors.forename: R J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Duffy
authors.forename: D D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Merritt
authors.forename: S L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Purcell
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D006801:Humans; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior