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Much of daily communication takes the form of story narratives.
Story comprehension and production depends on a logical sequence of cognitively-based story structures (e.g., story grammar), which guide interpretations, expectations, and inferences about relationships between people and events in a story.
Indices of story grammar (e.g., number of total episodes, proportion of T-units within episodes) have been shown to be sensitive to brain injury, but story grammar may not completely characterize a “good” story narrative.
It is possible for an individual to have high story grammar scores, reflecting ability to organize semantic content, and still produce an incomplete story.
“Good” story narratives likely depend on both organization and content.
INTRODUCTION
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROCEDURE
Task: After viewing a picture story with no soundtrack, each participant was instructed to retell the story. Retellings were recorded and transcribed.
T-unit segmentation involved identification of each independent clause and its associated subordinate clauses for each transcript.
Story grammar analysis (organization)
Story grammar was examined via episode structure. An episode consists of (a) an initiating event (IE) that prompts a character to formulate a goal-directed behavior, (b) an action (A), and (c) a direct consequence (DC) marking attainment or non-attainment of the goal.
The primary measure of story grammar was the proportion of T-units within episodic structure score (T-units within episodes/total T-units in retelling) combines information regarding both episodes (consisting of an initiating event, an attempt, & a direct consequence) and T-units.
Story completeness measure
Inventory of key events and characters produced in each transcript of the normative sample was created.
Pooled into a matrix across all non-brain-injured controls, inventory items clustered into 7 distinct components.
Inclusion criterion for critical component:80% of controls (range: 83% - 98%)5 components found to be critical
Each narrative reviewed for presence of 5 critical components (1 point for each component).
Completeness score: total number of critical components in each story
DATA ANALYSIS
Correlation coefficients were calculated for measures of story organization and story completeness.
Quantifying Goodness of Story NarrativesKaren Lê1, Carl A. Coelho1, Jennifer Mozeiko1 and Jordan Grafman2
1-University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT & 2-National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Bethesda, MD
The present study investigated an additional measure of story narrative performance—story completeness.
The story completeness measure involves a tally of the critical story components mentioned by the storyteller.
It was hypothesized that by combining organizational (story grammar) and completeness measures, story goodness could be quantified.
Figure 1.
RESULTS
Figure 3.
Figure 5.
Table 1: Participants
Participants (N)
Age Range in Years
Years of Education
Armed Forces Qualification Test
Boston Naming Test
Token Test
Control (46) 55-76 12-20 14-95 46-60 94-100
TBI (24) 54-62 10-18 13-97 25-60 91-100
All participants were native English-speaking males, who were Vietnam War veterans. All individuals with TBI survived penetrating head wounds during the Vietnam War.
Quadrant 1OrganizedIncomplete
Normative group: 2%
Quadrant 2OrganizedComplete
Normative group: 83%
Quadrant 3DisorganizedIncomplete
Normative group: 9%
Quadrant 4DisorganizedComplete
Normative group: 7%
DISCUSSION
When measures of story organization and completeness are combined, story goodness can be quantified.
The combined measure proved to be sensitive in that it classified the story narratives of control subjects into 4 distinct subgroups of story goodness.
There is potential utility for analyzing narratives using the combined measure in clinical populations and lesion analyses.
A moderate correlation between the story organization and story completeness measures was noted (.531, p = .01), suggesting the indices are not entirely measuring the same things.
Figure 2.
Performance across the two measures is plotted in quadrants. Quadrant boundaries were set at 1SD below the mean (dashed lines) for each measure: .49 for story organization (story grammar) and 3.34 for story completeness.
Quadrant 1 was defined by scores of > .49 for story organization and ≤ 3.34 for story completeness.Quadrant 2 was defined by scores of > .49 for story organization and > 3.34 for story completeness.Quadrant 3 was defined by scores of ≤ .49 for story organization and ≤ 3.34 for story completeness.Quadrant 4 was defined by scores of ≤ .49 for story organization and > 3.34 for story completeness.
PURPOSE
PURPOSE
METHODS
Figure 4.
Contact: [email protected]
Figure 5.
