Modification of Source Text Coherence in Reproductive Verbal Reasoning Activity of Adolescents with Altered Cognitive Status (on the material of retelling the listened text)

This empirical research is an attempt to profile speech of teenagers whose cognitive status has been affected by congenital heart disease (CHD) and related surgery. The theory and methodology rely on psycholinguistics, child neuropsychology, linguistics of speech disorders, and text theory. Two groups of 13–15 y.o. teenagers (30 teenagers with CHD and 30 conditionally healthy peers) were asked to retell a 50-word text. The secondary texts obtained were subjected to standard methods of cognition and philological text analysis, which confirmed the hypothesis about the impact of surgery for congenital heart disease on the reproductive speech and mental activity of young patients. Although the average text length was very similar in both groups, the test group respondents tended to reduce the original text, which affected its coherence. When they preserved the length of the text, it came less coherent than a text of the same length in the control group. Thus, the length of the reproduced text correlated with its completeness and accuracy: shorter renderings lacked significant plot elements and demonstrated a much poorer coherence. The control group participants were more accurate in reproducing the content of the stimulus text: their renderings were, on average, more coherent. The low coherence in the test group manifested itself in the following ways. The teenagers with CHD tended to reduce the number of actions performed by the characters. They replaced one action with another, changed or lost the motive behind the actions or the consequences of these actions, and omitted essential details. The research results are of interdisciplinary significance, since at present no publications report linguocognitive data on the reproductive speech of young patients with CHD. The research prospects involve looking for methods to quantify and formalize the coherence of reproduced texts, as well as an analysis of grammatical and lexical features.

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