Cohesion repairs in the narratives of normal-language and language-disordered school-age children

The self-initiated repairs produced by 14 normal-language and 14 language-disordered children during a story retelling task are described. When grammatical repairs and repairs to text meaning were analysed, no group differences were found for either repair type. Both groups initiated significantly more repairs to text meaning. When repairs to text meaning were probed for the cohesive aspects of the repair activity, there were no group differences for the frequency or the types of cohesive repairs that were initiated. However, differences were significant for the success of the cohesive repair attempts and for the location of the repairs. Normal-language and language-disordered children appear to share similar strategies for monitoring narrative discourse, but they differ in their abilities to actualize their monitoring attention.