Abstract

This thesis project focused on the complexity of story generations produced by four children with language impairment across treatment sessions. Specifically, the participants' utterances were analyzed to determine if the children produced simple story elements and/or more complex cause/effect story elements. The children's utterances were also analyzed to identify emotion words in order to consider the children's awareness of the emotions experienced by characters in the stories. All participants approached the story generation task by describing characters and actions based on pictures from the book. Two participants did not express any causal relationships and two participants expressed some awareness of causal relationships, suggesting an emergence of this ability. Furthermore, participants' ability to recognize emotions varied. All of the children were able to label at least one emotion across sessions, and two participants increased production of emotion words across sessions. None of the participants linked character actions/reactions to the overall theme of the story. Further research is needed to determine effective ways to help children bridge the gaps between simple descriptions and more complex causal relationships.

Degree

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders

Rights

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