Peets, Kathleen, Dr. Rosemary Tannock, Dr. Jonathan Fine
Dept. of Psychiatry Research
Hospital for Sick Children
Toronto, Canada

Ms. Kathleen Peets, Dr. Rosemary Tannock, Dr. Jonathan Fine
Hospital for Sick Children
Dept. of Psychiatry Research
555 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario M5G 1X8



Strand: language disorders and problems

Title: Towards a Systemic Functional Model in the Analysis of Self-Initiated Corrections and Repetitions in Children's Narratives

A model is developed using concepts borrowed from Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1985; Halliday and Hasan, 1976) and psychology (Evans, 1985) that suggests retracings (self-initiated repetitions and corrections) reflect differences in the narrative abilities of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Normal Controls (NC). ADHD is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by impairments in planning, organizing and self-monitoring. Clinical findings show that children with ADHD show fewer retracings in their narratives than do the NC group. The linguistic model developed would have to account for the deficits in organization and self-monitoring, and capture the differences between the retracings of the two groups. In this sense, considerations at a Textual level are essential (theme/rheme, cohesion), as are considerations of other Systemic categories that can account for the unique relationship between the "replaced" and "replacing" elements within correction. Therefore additional considerations were made including concepts borrowed from taxis and experiential categories. Findings included a higher level of uncorrected errors within ADHD grouups, accompanied by a "clustering" effect of corrections and repetitions. In contrast, the NC groups showed fewer uncorrected errors and a higher use of collocates within the retracing. These findings suggest that the NC group were more effectively able to use the retracing as an organizational and self-monitoring tool than were the ADHD populations, whose retracings tended to confuse the listener through clustering and lack of collocations.