The long-term objective of this project is to provide a comprehensive characterization of the problems experienced by learning-disabled (LD) students with a major form of narrative discourse: the story. Launched in 1983, the specific aim of this research is to compare the narrative performances of a sample of LD and normally-achieving (NA) subjects over three age ranges in three different processing modalities. Several factors motivated this research. First, narrative discourse deficits are particularly debilitating for school-age children because academic curricula rely heavily on a students's ability to produce, recall, and understand extended units of narrative discourse, in the form of oral presentations, written composition, relating personal experiences, and the like. Therefore, deficits in narration may impact significantly on a child's academic achievement. Second, there is evidence suggesting that narrative discourse proficiency may be a predictor of academic success. Finally, there is reason to expect that the academic problems demonstrated by LD students are related to deficient narrative discourse skills. The data for this project have already been collected from 48 LD and 47 NA students, 15-16 each at the 8:0-9:11, 10:0-11:11, and 12:0- 13:11 age levels. Each of the 95 subjects participated in 6 experimental tasks: (a) oral spontaneous story production, (b) oral structured story production, (c) written structured story production, (d) oral story recall to an adult, and (e) oral story recall to a hypothetical young child. Subject performance on each task will be analyzed both for aspects of story structure (story organization and formulation abilities) and sense of audience (the ability to take the perspective of one's communication partner). Story structure will be examined using a story grammar approach and through an analysis of syntactic complexity. Sense of audience will be measured through an analysis of reference cohesion and through an evaluation of story style modification. Statistical analysis of the data will be aimed at: (a) comparing LD and NA group performance on each experimental task and between and among tasks for each measure of story structure and sense of audience, (b) discovering developmental changes in narration abilities as a function of increased age, and (c) identifying a set of variables that can be used to predict group membership (i.e., LD vs. NA).
