Developmental changes in narrative and non-narrative discourse in children with and without brain injury

This study presents a set of narrative and non-narrative tasks and analytic procedures for examining the discourse development of children with perinatal brain injury and typically developing children. Three oral discourse genres were collected at ages 5, 6, and 7: script, picture description, and replica play narration. Genre performances were assessed for the presence of hypothesized genre features. Results suggest these tasks and procedures are able to characterize development in discourse abilities for both a normative group and for children with perinatal brain injury. The group of children with brain injury produced shorter discourse performance with more off-task talk. This group also showed difficulty in fully differentiating the various genre types and in creating integrated discourse performances. However, most of these children demonstrated considerable growth in control of genre features over this time period. The possible utility of these tasks and procedures for clinical assessment is discussed.