Reference-cohesion skills in the spoken narratives of 7-year-old children

The purpose of this study was to investigate the reference-cohesion skills in spoken narratives of 7-year-old children with normal language and with language impairments. The subjects were twenty-four 7-year-old students, 12 with normal language and 12 with language impairments. Each subject participated individually in four separate story-retelling tasks. These stories were transcribed and analyzed for reference cohesion. Descriptive data for the two groups of children for the four stories were collected and analyzed for the following measures: percentage of incomplete/erroneous reference-cohesion ties, number of C-units (communication units), and number of correct responses to comprehension questions. Independent variables were group membership and story selection.;Results of this study indicate that reference-cohesion skills in spoken narratives are not well developed at age 7 for either children with language impairments or children with normal language.