Effects of elicitation procedures on the narratives of normal and closed head-injured adults.

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.