Coherencia en textos infantiles cortos como criterio psicolingüístico en casos de trastorno en la escritura

Abstract

Writing disabilities have been studied either apart from any linguistic consideration or with regard to quite superficial language phenomena; e.g. the way letters are written. The present paper reports some results of an ongoing inquiry which tries to throw light on writing disabilities by an examination of the coherence or incoherence of short texts written by children. The concept of coherence used is a new one and goes beyond the classical notions of cohesion and connexity; although it stays close to syntactic facts. By applying this new concept; six degrees of coherence can be distinguished along an ordered scale. A statistical study which compares texts written by disabled children with those produced by a a control group with regard both to the usual variables taken as independent (age; school grade; sex; earlier language disorders) and to other text-related variables (number of words and propositions) suggests that writing disabilities have a deeper linguistic basis than is usually observed.