Causal Coherence in Deaf and Hearing Students' Written Narratives

This study investigates the causal coherence of deaf students’ written narratives and the relation between students’ use of causal structures in narrative writing and their linguistic skills. The written narratives of 17 deaf high school students were compared with those of 2 groups of hearing writers: 17 high school tudents and 16 second graders. Participants were asked to produce a written narrative on the basis of the picture storybook Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969) and their texts were analyzed according to the causal network model. The number of psychological links and superordinate and subordinate narrative episodes were considered, and the extent to which the use of these causal structures and deaf students’ scores in a written syntax comprehension test correlated was examined. Results show that deaf writers made use of principles of causal organization in narrative writing. However, their texts were causally less coherent than those of their hearing peers and closer to young hearing writers’ texts, although with some important differences in the strategies for generating coherence. Deaf students’ written syntax skills seemed to be only partially correlated with their difficulties in generating causal coherence.