As I understand it, causal coherence is the ability to link cause and effect not only in writing but as a cognitive exercise. In other words, it has two steps: making the link between cause and effect in the mind, and then expressing it. This paper, “Causal Coherence in Deaf and Hearing Students’ Written Narratives“, looks at differences in how Deaf and hearing students do this in writing. An interesting sidenote is that the stimulus, “Frog, Where Are You?” is standard in working with a variety of language populations and ages in part because it has no text.
Please note that the word is CAUSAL not CASUAL. This mistake drives me nuts. The paper is not about casual coherence, as if structures that hold a narrative together are informal. It is a study of how Deaf students’ writing reveals their thinking of cause and effect.
Citation: Arfé, Barbara and Boscolo, Pietro (2006). Causal Coherence in Deaf and Hearing Students’ Written Narratives. Discourse Processes, 42(3), 271-300.
Abstract: 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 students 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.
