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Background: Discourse functionality is a primary goal of aphasia assessment and intervention. People who have aphasia often display a paradoxical functionality in their production of discourse, despite their aphasic impairment. A variety of linguistic and non-linguistic resources are orchestrated to produce coherent discourse. One discourse genre, the personal story, is ubiquitous and fills important intrapersonal and interpersonal functions. Aims: The primary objective is to provide a framework for the structure and function of personal stories, to guide future clinical discourse research towards development of practical clinical assessment of discourse functionality in people who have aphasia. Main Contribution: Characteristics of personal stories in their context of use are discussed for their contributions to overall discourse coherence. Examples of coherent and incoherent personal stories narrated by people who have aphasia illustrate interactions among coherence-building resources. The influence of group contexts and cultural contexts on coherence of personal stories is considered. Conclusions: It is the interaction, and not the componential addition, of multiple resources that supports coherent production of personal stories in context. Qualitative frameworks need to be integrated with quantitative approaches as we develop reliable and valid means of functional discourse assessment. An understanding of the lives of people who have aphasia will be essential for defining the most meaningful and functional contexts for our discourse assessments.

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This investigation explores the discourse devices associated with high-quality personal narratives. The study examined normative characteristics of 11 high-quality personal narratives of a frightening experience identified (from a larger set of 72 narratives) for their effectiveness in engaging the audience. Lay ratings and an ethnographic interview with seven of the excellent storytellers further characterized the stories and validated their selection. Narratives of both African Americans and Caucasians were represented, and were similar in nature. The excellent narratives were longer, conveyed more fearful topics, and were more dramatic than average narratives. Drama was achieved through direct speech, prosodic shifts, voice changes, inclusion of multiple characters, repetition, and syntactic and semantic parallelism. Illustrative narrative excerpts are provided. This study illustrates the potential in pairing holistic and analytical approaches to narrative analysis.