Narratives from three studies differing in subject pools, elicitation procedures, and story content were analyzed using seven variables hypothesized to measure a variety of language abilities used in narrative production. Two questions were addressed: (a) To what extent did multiple variables represent common factors? and (b) To what extent did these variables distinguish children with language disorder from their nondisordered peers? Results indicated that: (a) The seven variables represented two factors; Factor I measured global organization of content (i.e., episode structure), and Factor II measured within- and across-sentence structure (i.e., grammatical sentence structure, within subordinate clause productivity, and textual cohesion), and (b) regardless of study, only the variables representing Factor II were selected as the most effective in predicting group membership.

A slide viewing technique designed to assess spontaneous nonverbal expressiveness was administered to 37 male patients including 8 left hemisphere damaged (aphasic), 10 right hemisphere damaged, 9 Parkinson's disease, and 10 non brain-damaged (control) patients. Patients watched different types of affective slides while their facial/gestural responses were videotaped. Judges watching the video tapes without audio guessed the types of slide being viewed. Results indicated that aphasic patients were equal to or more expressive than controls, while right hemisphere damaged and Parkinson's disease patients were less expressive. The possibility that spontaneous non verbal expressiveness is mediated by the right cerebral hemisphere, with the left hemisphere playing an inhibitory role, was discussed as a tentative explanation.

Stories were elicited under two conditions--story retelling and story generation--from a group of 23 normal young adults and 4 closed head-injured (CHI) adults who had reached a high level of language recovery. Sentence production, intersentential cohesion, and story grammar were analyzed. The results demonstrated that the two elicitation tasks differentially influenced the performance of both normal and CHI subjects at all levels of analysis, and the two groups differed in the cohesive and story grammar measures only in the story generation task. It is concluded that comparing performance across tasks of story retelling and story generation is a useful procedure for characterizing the discourse problems of CHI subjects with recovery of high-level language skills.

Preliminary findings from an ongoing investigation of the potential relationship between narrative discourse performance and executive functions in adults with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are reported. Narrative stories were elicited from 32 adults with TBI. Stories were analysed at three levels: sentence production, intersentential cohesive adequacy, and story episode structure. These measures were then correlated with scores from the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), the primary measure of executive function. A significant correlation was noted between a factor score from the WCST and the measure of story structure, but not sentence production or cohesive adequacy. These results suggest that executive functions may be a promising avenue to pursue in the search for underlying causal factors of narrative discourse dysfunction and, therefore to better delineate the nature of communicative deficits secondary to TBI.

Coordinating and integrating different policies and public sector organizations is a major challenge for practitioners and a continuing topic of interest for researchers. This Viewpoint essay argues that research on this topic needs reorientation to provide better insights for practice and theory of policy making, as well as policy implementation. The authors offer four suggestions on how future research could advance: (1) combining existing conceptual and epistemological approaches more systematically; (2) complementing case studies and surveys with large-N analyses and novel research tools and methods; (3) more systematic analysis of the causal mechanisms in policy coordination and integration; and (4) more thorough study of the real-world impact of policy coordination and integration.