| Summary: | Bibliography: leaves 62-69. === The spoken language productions of three language impaired learning disabled and non-learning disabled young adolescents were explored using a narrative discourse analysis procedure. The purpose was to compare the narrative production abilities of language impaired learning disabled and non-learning disabled young adolescents on a number of measures: story length, amount of information, coherence, evaluation and cohesion. In addition, it compared the performance of language impaired learning disabled and non-learning disabled young adolescents on three types of narrative tasks (story generation from a picture, personal narrative, and story retelling). Furthermore, this study investigated the stability of the narrative scores over three measurement times. The narrative discourse productions were analysed using more stringent reliability measures. Measures of reliability were obtained by calculating inter-rater and intra-rater reliability measures and testing for stability of scores across the three testing sessions. The results indicated that 46 of the 48 dependent measures in this study remained stable across the three testing times. One of the most important clinical findings in this study was that the language impaired learning disabled young adolescents are able to retell and generate narratives. Significant differences were however, found between the two groups. The language impaired learning disabled young adolescents produced shorter and less coherent and cohesive stories than the non-learning disabled young adolescents. Although they used fewer cohesive devices, they did not use significantly more incomplete and erroneous cohesive ties than the non-learning disabled young adolescents. The analysis of task effects indicated that story retelling is more clinically useful with language-impaired learning-disabled young adolescents for an assessment of narrative discourse ability than story generation. The implications for use of narrative discourse and types of story collection tasks for the assessment of language impaired learning disabled young adolescents are discussed.
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