The use of discourse analysis in neurolinguistics: some findings from the narratives of hemidecorticate adolescents Jean E. Newman, PhD Assistant Professor Departments of Linguistics and Psychology University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico Maureen W. Lovett, PhD Associate Professor of Pediatrics The Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto Maureen Dennis, PhD Associate Professor Research Institute The Hospital for Sick Children Associate Professor Department of Behavioral Science University of Toronto Toronto, Canada BASIC FACT of language research is that language use in isolation often bears little resemblance to language use in context. The researcher who hopes to learn about the capabilities of the larger language system by studying its compo- nents may well find, on assembling the pieces, that the Gestalt psychologists were right—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Yet researchers often rely on a componential approach, either for ease of study or because, in the case of neurolin- guistics, the data appear to demand a reductionist approach. The general ques- tion to be pursued here is whether the application of a more global, discourse- oriented approach to a neurolinguistic problem can provide insights into the mechanics of the linguistic systems of the affected individuals. Of specific interest are the linguistic contributions of the left and right hemispheres, which will be examined by studying the use of pragmat- ics in the narratives of three hemidecorti- cate adolescents. 31382 ‘TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS / DECEMBER 1986, OVERVIEW OF APPROACHES TO NEUROLINGUISTICS The study of those individuals who, through brain injuries or birth defects, have developed aberrant linguistic sys- tems has presented researchers with useful natural experiments. For years researchers have concentrated on describing the dis-* tinctive properties of these subsystems, including anomias (failure to name when presented with an object; e.g., Geschwind, 1967), agrammatism in Broca’s aphasics (eg, Zurif, Caramazza, & Myerson, 1972), and comprehension deficits in Wernicke’s aphasics (e.g., Grober, Perec- man, Kellar, & Brown, 1980). Although there is evidence from a vari- ety of sources in favor of hemispheric language specialization, the nature of unique left and right hemisphere lan- guage abilities is still being explored (Blumstein & Cooper, 1974; Tucker, Wat- son & Heilman, 1977; Weintraub, Mesu- lam & Kramer, 1981). Recent research has addressed the extent to which right hemi- sphere language is imaginal and affective, rather than propositional (e.g, Millar & Whitaker, 1983). ‘The language abilities of brain-injured individuals are usually studied for one of the following reasons: to establish (on the basis of spontaneous speech samples or of speech and language tests) how language is used and understood in persons or groups with neuropathology; or, alterna- tively, to see how samples of brain-injured language can be used to formulate or refine psycholinguistic theories about the organization of the language system (e.g., Caramazza & Zurif, 1976; Goodglass & Baker, 1976). Language comprehension and use in context, however, has not been ignored by researchers. Recently a less extensive but interesting strand of research on the discourse capacities of brain-damaged individuals has been de- veloped, consisting of a set of studies designed to clarify the ability of various pathological groups to use linguistic devices that promote cohesion in dis- courses and texts (eg. Engel-Ortlieb, 1981; Ulatowska, Doyel, Stern, & Haynes, 1988). THE ROLE OF PRAGMATICS IN DISCOURSE PROCESSING The last several years have seen consid- erable interest in an area that was for- merly considered to be outside the realm of linguistic inquiry. Spurred by develop- ments in the philosophy of language (Aus- tin, 1962; Grice, 1975; Searle, 1969), text linguistics (see de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981, for a review) and the influence of functionalism in linguistics (e.g., Bolinger, 1977; Halliday, 1985; and the Prague School, e.g., Dane3, 1960), researchers have become increasingly aware of the importance of studying language in con- text. Speech act theory (Austin and Searle) and Grice’s description of conversational “logic” have drawn attention to the rela- tion between the speaker's intention, the words chosen to express this intention, and their combined effect on listeners. Each utterance can be classified as an instance of “speech act,” as the purpose of uttering is to “do things with words” (Austin’s [1962] title). An act can be direct, in which case the intent is clear from the words themselves, or indirect, in which case the listener must rely on knowledge or context(including perhaps knowledge of the speaker's past behavior). The development of text and story grammars, which rely on propositional accounts of meaning and rewrite rules similar to those found in sentence gram- ‘mars, has given rise to formal descriptions of extended discourse of varying degrees of complexity. Psychologists have found these formalisms to be particularly useful because the derived representation of a text (based on underlying meaning rather than form) can be used to predict patterns of comprehension and recall (e. Mandler & Johnson, 1977; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1980). Another approach to the study of extended discourse in context has focused on descriptive analyses of the wording (or surface features) of texts that contribute to their “textuality” and resulting compre- hensibility. Linguists such as Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Chafe (1976; 1982) focus on the function of a particular utter- ance in its context. Halliday, for example, has written extensively on the roles of given and new information in discourse (see Halliday, 1970, for a summary). Given information is presupposed, situa- tionally salient, or shared (Prince, 1981), usually receives reduced stress, and is typi- cally utterance-initial. New information usually receives the greatest pitch move- ment and is either utterance-final or the focus of a marked construction. The sen- tence It was Rover who ate the roast illustrates the use of a cleft construction to mark Rover as new information. Although the propositional content is the same, the roast, not Rover, is more likely to be interpreted as new information in the active version, Rover ate the roast. The DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN NEUROLINGUISTICS existence of markers to differentiate new from given information allows readers and listeners to allocate processing resources efficiently during comprehen- sion (see Cutler, 1976). Clark and Havi- land (1977) showed that on encountering new input in a discourse, readers attempt to determine whether it is given by search- ing memory. Failure to find a prior men- tion or related information forces readers to spend additional time integrating the new information, he burgeoning field of discourse anal- ysis has been fed by three lines of inqui- ry—speech act theory, text grammars, and surface feature analyses—each con- cerned with pragmatics, or the study of (purposeful) language use in context. Although they have been presented as separate influences, they clearly overlap. Nonetheless, the present focus is on sur- face feature analyses and their application to neurolinguistics. Studies of surface features, such as cohesion analysis, provide a convenient starting point for the assessment of dis- course knowledge because the surface features of an utterance are more immedi- ately available than the underlying struc- ture, This immediacy directly affects pro- cessing demands, and as a result, the ease of comprehension. Furthermore, as was previously discussed, there are theoretical reasons for supposing that a speaker's use of surface features is indicative of his or her linguistic competence. Cohesion analysis Cohesion analysis, originally proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), describes the aspects of the surface structure that are responsible for connecting linguistic 3384 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS / DECEMBER 1986 elements to form a text. The prerequisite for any text is that it be semantically coherent (i.e, make sense), but this fea- ture does not necessarily lead to its being cohesive. Sometimes a speaker may attempt to present a narrative but fail to provide the listener with the relevant con- nections between one semantic unit and the next, in which case the text is said to lack cohesion. If, for example, a speaker uses pronouns from the beginning of a story, She did it to him. They saw it. John blamed him, the listener may understand the sequence of events but be unable to understand the topic. Who are she, him and they? Is John the recipient of what- ever she did? Simply stated, the speaker has failed to provide referents for the pronouns and pro-verb (did it), and has provided a referent without clearly mark- ing its relation to the preceding discourse. Without these mental “anchors,” the lis- Without these mental “anchors,” the listener will be unable to build a coherent representation of the developing text and may give up attempts to process it as a lost cause. tener will be unable to build a coherent representation of the developing text and may give up attempts to process it as a lost, cause. Discourse that is cohesive can in unu- sual circumstances (such as examples invented by linguists) be incoherent, as the following example demonstrates (as cited by Brown & Yule, 1983, p. 197): I bought a Ford. A car in which President Wilson rode down the Champs Elysees was black. Black English has been widely dis- ‘cussed. The discussions between the presidents ended last week. This example appears to be cohesive because it uses surface ties such as lexical substitution (a car for a Ford) and lexical repetition (black followed by Black English) between adjacent utterances. However, it is obviously semantically incoherent. These examples readily differentiate cohesion and coherence. Listeners and readers, however, normally assume that speakers and authors abide by some ver- sion of Grice’s Conversational Maxim to be relevant (Grice, 1975), and in doing so, convey coherence through the use of cohe- sion. Individuals who give the appearance of local cohesion without coherence are usually judged to be thought-disordered or impaired in some way, such as Wernicke’s (posterior) aphasies or schizophrenics (see Rochester & Martin, 1979). The posterior aphasic in the following example demon- strates cohesion by the use of a pronoun (they) for a previously mentioned noun (barbers), but the sentence as a whole makes no sense (from Gardner, 1976, p. 68). Oh, I'm taking the word the wrong way to say, all of the barbers here whenever they stop you it's going round and round... Examples of coherence, with varying degrees of successful attempts at cohesion, can be found in the speech of Broca’s (anterior) aphasies for whom the produe- tion of elements marking discourse rela- tions is particularly difficult, as in the next example (from Gardner, 1976, p. 61): Clinician: And have you been going home on weekends? Patient: Why, yes... Thursday, er, er, er, no, er, Friday... Bar-ba-ra. .. wife... .and, oh,car... drive. .. purnpike (sic). .-restand...TV you know Although cohesion may seem to be a subtle aspect of language use in normal individuals, it has an important effect on comprehension. The more consistently a speaker uses cohesive devices to provide cues to the discourse topic and the rela- tions between utterances, the more likely it is that the listener will correctly, and easily, arrive at the speaker's intent. Stud- ies of one important form of cohesion, anaphoric reference, have shown that sub- jects take longer to comprehend sentences in which a pronoun is potentially co- referential with two previously mentioned proper nouns (Caramazza, Grober, Gar- vey, & Yates, 1977), as in John hit Bill because he was angry. Listeners clearly expect speakers to make unique assign- ments of pronouns to referents, Anaphoric reference The study of the referential system in general, and anaphora in particular, has been particularly important in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelli- gence. Anaphora (in which one linguistic entity refers backward to another having the same identity) represents an economi- cal means of coding meaning relations in a text without having to resort to high levels of redundancy. Psycholinguists have stud- ied three classes of variables that affect the listener's assignment of a referent for a pronoun: (a) information processing; (b) thematic; and (c) semantic. One information processing constraint that affects the degree of activation of a particular entity is the capacity of short term memory. For example, Clark and Sengul (1979) showed that it is easier to DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN NEUROLINGUISTICS identify the referent for a pronoun when it is mentioned in the preceding sentence (or clause). With intervening sentences, it becomes more difficult to determine the referent as the following sequence shows (Clark & Sengul, 1979, p. 85): Yesterday I ‘met a woman who had written a book on viruses. She had studied them for years and years. It was selling very well. Because the referent for it is mentioned two sentences previously, more time must be devoted to searching short-term mem- ory for the referent than if the second and third sentences were reversed. Surface structure changes that alter the information structure of an utterance are termed thematic and include passiviza- tion (Caramazza & Gupta, 1979) and emphatic stress (Newman, 1981). These variables also affect referent choices. For example, Bill is more likely to be selected as the referent in the sentence Bill was hit by John because he was angry than in the original, active, sentence. Semantic prop- erties of the surrounding text, such as the choice of verb, are the third influence on referent choice. For example, the use of avoided in the preceding sentence favors Bill as the referent, whereas phoned favors John (Garvey & Caramazza, 1974). Two other semantic variables, the current discourse context and the listener's knowl- edge of the world (see Hirst & Brill, 1980), also have powerful effects on referent choice. The processes governing the speaker's decision to use a pronoun to refer to a particular entity are less clear. However, by assuming that speakers behave in accord with some notion of a conversa- tional Cooperative Principle (Clark & Haviland, 1977; Grice, 1975), we may conjecture that speakers use pronouns 38586 ‘TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS / DECEMBER 1986 judiciously and are aware of the three classes of constraints faced by listeners. For example, speakers are expected to introduce referents before using pronouns to refer to them. Failure to do so would indicate that the speaker had violated what Clark and Haviland have termed the Given-New Contract (i.e., in this example, to provide sufficient background informa- tion to allow the listener to find an ante- cedent for the pronoun). Speakers might also be expected to fol- low some principle of cognitive economy as they are undoubtedly bound by infor- mation-processing constraints of their own, Such constraints would cause them to use pronouns when feasible rather than unnecessarily reintroducing the referents. Indeed, using a proper name where a pronoun will do might lead the listener to assume erroneously that the speaker has introduced a new person with the same name. Appropriate use of a referential system provides cohesion and indicates topical links across utterances. Texts with- cout these cohesive devices appear to be disjointed and lacking in fluency, and are more difficult to understand. The role of pragmatics in language pro- cessing has only recently been addressed in the neurolinguistic literature. Foldi, Cicone, and Gardner (1988) point out a number of pragmatic aspects of language that are affected by brain damage. While it provides a number of interesting find- ings and suggestions for future research, their review is far from conclusive. Inton- ation, for example, appears to be a pri- marily right hemisphere function when its affective and perceptual aspects are con- sidered as shown by findings of flat inton- ation contours in right hemisphere-dam- aged patients (Foldi, Cicone, & Gardner, 1983) and the results of dichotomic listen- ing tasks (Blumstein & Cooper, 1974). The possible contribution of the left hemi- sphere to propositional uses of intonation, however, remains unresolved. For exam- ple, Foldi, Cicone, and Gardner (1983) cite unpublished evidence that Wer- nicke’s aphasies produce “hypermelodic” contours that are clearly divorced from semantic content. The contours of the effortful, agrammatic utterances of Bro- ca’s aphasics, in contrast, show evidence of planning and are appropriately adjusted to accommodate utterance length. Foldi, Cicone, and Gardner (1988) argue that aphasies generally retain some aspects of pragmatics (such as the distinc- tion between direct and indirect speech acts) even if the semantic content of their utterances is unclear. Furthermore, right- hemisphere damage can disrupt prag- matic knowledge even though (proposi- tional) linguistic knowledge may be intact. Thus the disruption of left-hemisphere processing in aphasics may be partially compensated for by the remaining prag- matic abilities of the right hemisphere. For example, Foldi, Cicone, and Gardner (1983) report that Broca’s aphasics may rely on the environment, gesture, and knowledge of conversational rules in order to clarify the referent in an utterance. Broca’s aphasics were also reported to be sensitive to the distinction between given and new information, Wernicke’s apha- sics, in contrast, were not, nor were they capable of using pragmatic information to signal reference. Tt should be apparent that the roles of the right and left hemispheres in the pro- duction and comprehension of connected discourse are far from understood. Although the hypothesis of right-hemi-sphere dominance for processing prag- matics is attractive, it seems far too simple. The pragmatic components of language appear to be additionally affected by left- hemisphere damage; otherwise the differ- ences reported to exist between Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasics (both left-hemi- sphere damage) for reference and given- new information could not have been obtained. Clearly, further exploration of the role of pragmatics in discourse is important for a full understanding of lan- guage use in brain-injured populations. DISCOURSE PROCESSING IN HEMIDECORTICATE ADOLESCENTS The cohesive use of pronouns One way to study the pragmatic func- tions of discourse production and compre- hension in brain-injured individuals is to explore how pronouns are manipulated in their oral narratives to achieve referential cohesion. Establishing pronominal refer- ence requires the simultaneous apprecia- tion of information about the semantic content and the grammatical context in which a pronoun occurs. In addition, a study of pronoun cohesiveness in brain- damaged subjects, for whom other lan- guage test performance is available, not only might be expected to reveal the level of narrative discourse skill, but also the relationship between conventional mea- sures of language test performance and newer methods of evaluating how lan- guage is used and understood in context. The language of young hemidecorticates A number of published studies discuss- ing the cognitive abilities of three young DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN NEUROLINGUISTICS subjects after a hemispherectomy have been reported (e.g., Dennis, 1980; Dennis, 1983; Dennis & Kohn, 1975; Dennis, Lov- ett, & Wiegel-Crump, 1981; Dennis & Whitaker, 1976). These individuals have a medical history that is as dramatic as it is unique. All were born with a brain malfor- mation that caused early and intractable epileptic seizures that were treated by removal of half of their brain mass in the first weeks of life (Hoffman, Hendrick, Dennis, & Armstrong, 1979). Since the removal of their malformed brain tissue antedated speech development, this meant that the subjects had to acquire language with one cerebral hemisphere rather than two. The speech and language abilities of these subjects have been stud- ied in detail because such data bear on the important question: Which skills can the left and the right cerebral hemisphere master when each brain half develops in isolation? ‘The answer to this question is complex. Language under conditions of early and atypical lateralization was not uniformly good or consistently poor. Rather, there has emerged a characteristic pattern of language development. Either brain half could acquire and maintain normal mech- anisms of speech production and articula- tion, a well-functioning semantic system, and a fair degree of verbal fluency. How- ever, when the derivation of meaning is dependent upon responsiveness to lan- guage form or syntactic knowledge, the young subject possessing the left-brain half has been reliably superior to the two with language development mediated by a right hemisphere. The various studies of early hemidecor- ticate language have revealed hints that the two hemispheres might be differently 38738 ‘TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS / DECEMBER 1986 However, when the derivation of meaning is dependent upon responsiveness to language form or syntactic knowledge, the young subject possessing the left-brain half has been reliably superior to the two with language development mediated by the right hemisphere. skilled in the use of pronouns to achieve text cohesion. For instance, the ability to integrate both semantic (the features of person, number, and gender) and syntac- tic (the grammatical category features of pronoun and case assignment) pronoun information was more poorly developed in children with early left hemidecortication than in the right hemidecorticate. The isolated right hemisphere was less adept at manipulating the reference relationships of pronouns in short written texts (Dennis & Whitaker, 1976). In order to analyze in more detail and with more formal tools how each hemisphere used pronouns in longer textual narratives, a recent study was conducted (Lovett, Dennis, & New- man, 1986) on the narrative discourse skills of the hemidecorticate subjects who were of normal intelligence (IQ 90-99] and aged 12 to 14 at the time of the study, A STUDY OF PRONOUN COHESION IN NARRATIVE DISCOURSE The study used four texts (Little Red Riding Hood, The Frog Prince, The Prac- tical Princess, and Goldilocks) of folk or fairy tales. The hemidecorticate subjects listened to each story read by the exam- iner and then were required to retell it using story puppets if they chose. Analyses of the story protocols indicated that the complexity of episode structures differed among the children. The right hemidecorticate (MW) produced stories that were different from those of the left hemidecorticates (SM and CA) who were, in addition, different from each other. For instance, MW produced stories that devel- oped more logically from setting through conflicts to resolution, while left hemide- corticate CA began many episodes that she failed to resolve. The overall impres- sion of listening to a story retold by MW is one both of clear comprehension and sophisticated language use, The left hemi- decorticate subjects, in contrast, told sto- ries that were less complex (though still recognizable as the target stories) and sub- jectively seemed to be more difficult to listen to and comprehend. The goal of the cohesion analyses was to devise a systematic means of making objective these perceived differences in the comprehensibility of the story retell- ings. In particular, an attempt was made to discover how some of the differences in story organization related to differences in the nature of the relations between text units in the stories, The following excerpts will illustrate the kind of textual issues that emerge from the story retellings that were the focus of the data analyses. The story is the classic fairy tale, The Frog Prince. In this epi- sode, the princess heroine reluctantly fol- lows through on her promise to feed and house a frog who had earlier retrieved her golden ball from the bottom of a pond: MW: And he started eating off the plate with her. And after dinner, he said, “Wi you-willyou please carry me up to your bed?” So she, she did. She laid him on the bed, hoping that by the morning he would be gone. SM: But she kept her promise and she told the frog to come in and eat dinner with her and sleep in her bed, And that night the princess hoped that the frog wouldn't be in her bed the next morning. CA: So the-then the princess remembered the promise that what she made to him. So they brought into the house and they started to eat, And-and then after he was tired. So the princess took the frog up to her room and then-um they went to sleep. And then the next day and-then she thought the frog would be gone the next day. The analysis of the data followed two distinct paths. The first path studied pro- noun use in relation to such issues as: the types of pronouns used and their distribu- tional features; how pronouns and explic- itly stated referents co-occur; the function of pronouns in conveying new, old, and presupposed information; and the role that pronouns play in assigning textual speech roles. This path originated with Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) work on cohesion, although their scoring system was modified extensively in the course of applying it to these texts. In the second path, the dynamic interplay between pro- nouns and referents throughout the story was represented in picture rebus form. THE USE OF PRONOUNS IN STORY RETELLING All of the hemidecorticate subjects made use of text cohesion in their story retelling. They produced a broad range of pronouns, and their pronouns were gener- ally correct. Each was able to use cohesion to some degree to indicate the textual DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN NEUROLINGUISTICS properties of stories. At some level, each succeeded in producing a narrative dis- course that would properly be termed cohesive. But there were differences, as well as similarities, between the hemide- corticate subjects. They did not achieve the same type or level of pronominal cohesion in their texts, and both individual and hemispheric differences were appar- ent in the patterns of pronoun use and in general narrative strategy. The pronouns produced by the three subjects were almost exclusively anaphoric (referring backward), and were primarily restricted to endophoric (within-text) instances. The perceived differences in comprehensibility did not appear to be due to simple quantitative differences in the use of particular types of pronouns (e.g, nominative, possessive, relative). The proportional distribution of pronoun types across story retellings closely paral- Jeled the distribution found in the stimulus stories for all three subjects (Lovett, Den- nis, & Newman, 1986). The first cohesion analysis demon- strated that although the three children referred to virtually identical numbers of characters in the stories, their means for doing so differed considerably. MW (the right hemidecorticate) pronominalized referents more frequently than the left hemidecorticate children, as is evident in the sample from his retelling, in which he used pronouns exclusively. In contrast, SM frequently reintroduced referents rather than using the appropriate pronouns. This difference is verified by the relative fre- quencies with which each child selected pronouns over explicit restatement of a referent. MW had the highest ratio of Pronoun use to referent mention (1.85 38940 ‘TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS / DECEMBER 1986 pronouns per referent mention), followed by CA (1.65); and SM (1.18) used pro- nouns and referents in almost a one-to-one ratio. If the stimulus texts’ average of 1.65 can be considered a rough estimate of the number of pronouns per referent in narra- tive texts, MW used slightly more pro- nouns than he heard, CA matched the texts, and SM was far below baseline. Not only did SM use fewer pronouns per referent than both the other children and the texts, but he also used the simplest form of anaphoric tie, most frequently linking pronouns directly to their refer- ents, In contrast MW, and toa lesser extent CA, sustained a number of indirect, or ‘mediated links between pronouns and their referents. In instances of mediation, the listener must find the referent for the pronoun by noting that it is co-referential with another pronoun that is either directly linked to the referent or is itself mediated. MW’s overwhelming prefer- ence for mediated rather than direct links (by more than a two-to-one ratio) indi- cates that he was able to keep a particular referent “on stage” (and presumably in the listener's short-term memory) through a chain of anaphoric reference to it. By comparison, SM (who had slightly more direct links than mediated links) was con- siderably less proficient at introducing and maintaining a discourse element by using the referential system. As a result, his stories have a disjointed and poorly connected referential flow. Measurement of the physical dimen- sions of the pronoun-referent relationship further illuminated the differential abili- ties of the children to sustain cohesive ties in their discourses. Lovett, Dennis, & ‘Newman (1986) counted the number of Measurement of the physical dimensions of the pronoun-referent relationship further illuminated the differential abilities of the children to sustain cohesive ties in their discourses. propositions (independent clausal seg- ments) intervening between a pronoun and its referent (a measure of span) and the number of individual elements in a mediated chain (depth). Span indicates how much of the text intervenes between the pronoun and its referent, while depth indicates the complexity of the link. In the sample from CA's retellings, the use of her in her room is directly linked to its refer- ent, princess, The link between she in she thought and the same referent is therefore mediated through the pronoun her, since both refer to the same character. As might be expected, MW had both the longest median span between pro- nouns and referents (2.14 propositions) and the greatest median depth to his mediated chains (8.04 mediations be- tween a referent and the last pronominal reference to it). Both of these values were somewhat higher than the corresponding values for the stimulus texts. In contrast, the median depths for both SM (2.28) and CA (2.88) were less than that of MW, and that of the stimulus texts (2.58). CA’s span measure (1.88) was close to the stimulus text value (which was 2.00), while SM’s median span (1,28) was considerably less. The results of these analyses indicate why the narratives of MW sounded more comprehensible and closer to an “ideal”discourse. Conceivably, the resulting dis- course makes fewer processing demands on the listener, thereby leaving him or her more resources for dealing with the con- tent. Paradoxically, MW’s use of mediated links, although they require the listener to reinstate the referent, may require less processing than direct links because the topic is clearly marked as given through anaphoric referential ties. SM’s greater reliance on direct links and lower rate of pronominal use may force the listener to set up separate representations for each mention of a referent. As a result, his stories would be more difficult to process. In contrast, CA tended to use pronouns more frequently, although she sometimes failed to tie them clearly to explicit refer- ents. Her stories, as a result, contained a degree of pronoun clutter (Lovett, Dennis, & Newman, 1986). Combined with her greater tendency to produce aborted epi- sodes, CA’s clutter may overtax the listen- er, who must repeatedly discover referents for superfluous pronouns only to realize that the characters mentioned are often subsequently (and confusingly) dropped. Finally, MW was able to maintain simultaneous story lines in his narratives with several pronouns and referential rela- tionships cohesively embedded. The use of cohesive referential chains clearly furthers this goal as it allows the listener to keep track of separate story elements. MW also made better use of anaphoric reference in retelling dialogue from the stories: his use of anaphora was equal in narrative and dialogue, while the other two children were more likely to use anaphora in the narrative portions of the texts, The addi- tional dialogue component probably con- tributes to the more varied texture of DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN NEUROLINGUISTICS MW’s stories and to the listener's subjec- tive impression of their richer content. Discourse analysis techniques are valu- able tools for the language researcher and the language clinician. Because they objectify and quantify whether and how a language sample adheres to normal (or tacitly accepted) conventions of discourse, the techniques have implications, not only for clinical diagnostic purposes, but for the broader study of language. At the same time, the techniques provide the re- searcher with an objective, rather than subjective basis for assessment and a con- crete point of departure from which to plan remedial procedures. The present study prompts two ques- tions: one is concerned with how the data should be interpreted in the context of current views about the constituents of the language system, the other is involved with how the data bear on the question of hemispheric asymmetry for pragmatic linguistic functions. Toa considerable extent, anaphoric ref- erence depends on mastery of the syntac- tic system. Because previous research has identified an isolated left-hemisphere superiority for oral and written syntax (e.g., Dennis & Kohn, 1975; Dennis, Lov- ett, & Wiegel-Crump, 1981; Dennis & Whitaker, 1976), the findings for pronom- inal reference might be considered as another instance of the greater capability of the left hemisphere for this component of language. However, reference is some- times treated as a form of pragmatic knowledge (e.g., Foldi, Cicone, & Gard- ner, 1983) and the differences observed in 4142, ‘TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS / DECEMBER 1986 the present cohesion analyses were not due to grammatically incorrect pronoun usage, but rather to pragmatic inappro- priateness. In order to determine the rela- tive contributions of pragmatics and syn- tax to narrative discourse in the two sides of the brain, it will be necessary to exam- ine further aspects of pragmatics in this and in other brain-damaged populations, perhaps including such functions as the use of intonation to indicate given and new information; sensitivity to distinctions between direct and indirect speech acts; and the ability to discern topic mainte- nance and shift through variations in sur- face and information structure. A difference in pragmatic competence between the two sides of the brain has been postulated on the basis of studies of left- and right-sided hemisphere brain injury, usually cerebrovascular accidents. The proficient performance of the right hemidecorticate, MW, shows that the left hemisphere in isolation is quite capable of dealing with pragmatic information, as indicated by the use of pronominal refer- ence. MW’s intact left hemisphere handles the problem of pronominal reference effi- ciently and effectively by using minimal repetition of the referent, relying instead on previous mention (or the use of given information) to indicate cohesion. Two different strategies were shown by the two children with an isolated right hemisphere (supporting the previously described view that the right hemisphere mediates certain aspects of language less uniformly than the left): excessive repetition of the refer- ent (reintroduction of given information as new) and excessive use of pronouns without adequate links to referents (pre- supposing that the information is given without providing the “anchor”). In each instance, the right-hemisphere speaker may be considered to have violated to some degree the Given-New Contract between speakers and listeners (Clark & Haviland, 1977). In contrast the child with the isolated left hemisphere appeared to abide by the tacit contract, thereby facili- tating the listener’s task. It is difficult to propose a simple inte- gration of these results on pragmatics in story retelling with the reports of pri- marily non-cohesive pragmatic tests in adult patients with right hemisphere lesions. First, it is evident that sustaining damage to a portion of a right hemisphere structure or function at maturity will result in a different type of brain organi- zation from having acquired language without a right hemisphere almost from birth. Second, a full spectrum of studies of pragmatic functions following brain dam- age has yet to be conducted. Indeed, the role of pragmatics in dis- course processing is only beginning to be investigated, and our understanding of it is certainly incomplete. Much more work remains to be done before a complete model of discourse processing can be for- mulated. In addition to the kinds of prag- matic variables discussed throughout this paper, such questions as genre and modal- ity (Chafe, 1982) and sociolinguistic con- cerns such as the relation between speaker and listener (see Gumperz, 1982) will need to be addressed. 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