Narrative Skills in Geriatrics Malayalam Speakers

Abstract

Narrative analysis is a systematic procedure for the analysis of recording the naturally occurring talk produced in everyday human interaction. The study focused on analysis of narrative skills in geriatrics. It includes a total 15 geriatrics (8 males&7 females) of age 60-70 years with no history of speech and hearing problem, neurological problem and who spoke Malayalam as their native language.

Narrative samples of familiar and unfamiliar tasks were taken and analyzed to study types of trouble sources such as phonological, morphological-syntactic, semantic, discourse and also repair strategies such as repetition, unrelated, elaboration, reduction and substitution along with the complexity and success of resolution like most successful, successful and unsuccessful and type token ratio using the systematic procedure.

The result shows that there is no significant difference between the trouble sources and type of repair strategies in familiar and unfamiliar tasks, while the repair sequences value is and type of resolutions showed highly significant difference. The comparison of type token ratio for familiar and unfamiliar tasks revealed that there is a highly significant difference for both open and close class words. So as the age increases there will be deterioration in the communicative skills. Future research is required to study the narrative aspects across various groups of adults and geriatrics and can be used in children with language disorders. Key Words: Narrative skills, Geriatrics, Malayalam.