MEASUREMENT OF NARRATIVE DISCOURSE ABILITY IN CHILDREN WITH LANGUAGE DISORDERS

Narratives from three studies differing in subject pools, elicitation procedures, and story content were analyzed using seven variables hypo thesized to measure a variety of language abilities used in narrative production. Two questions were addressed: (a) To what extent did multi ple variables represent common factors? and (b) To what extent did the se variables distinguish children with language disorder from their no ndisordered peers? Results indicated that: (a) The seven variables rep resented 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 subor dinate clause productivity, and textual cohesion), and (b) regardless of study, only the variables representing Factor II were selected as t he most effective in predicting group membership.