Previous investigations of a single family aggregate with developmental language impairment have suggested that the impaired members are disabled in their ability to use anaphoric pronouns. The present thesis sought to investigate further the use of anaphoric reference in this family using detailed, discourse-oriented analyses. Oral narratives were elicited from eight mature-language users, four language-impaired and four unimpaired. Discourse analysis was accomplished using procedures taken from normal acquisitional studies in which both the form (pronominal or nominal) and the function served by each form (switching or maintaining reference) are considered. The analysis revealed some differences between the language-impaired and unimpaired subjects in their use of pronominals in their narratives. However, three of the four language-impaired subjects used the same nominal-pronominal reference tracking strategies as their unimpaired relatives. The implications of these findings for the general ability of the language-impaired subjects to use pronouns anaphorically as well as future research directions are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.55518 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Oram, Janis |
| Contributors | Crago, Martha B. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (School of Communication Sciences and Disorders.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001425991, proquestno: AAIMM00045, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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