Contextual influences on narrative discourse in normal young adults

In an effort to provide some expectation regarding the influences of task and rehearsal, the narrative ability of 20 normal young adults was examined under the conditions of story retelling and story generation. Each task was repeated after a 1-week interval in order to investigate a possible practice effect. Sentence production, intersentential cohesion, and story grammar organization were analyzed. Results indicated that the subjects' performance varied as a function of task presentation as well as the measure used to describe narrative production. The only across-trials difference noted was an increase in cohesive adequacy from trial 1 to trial 2 for one of the story generation tasks. It may be concluded that (a) context does influence the manner and competence of narrative presentation, and (b) that rehearsal of a complex narrative improves narrative coherence.