ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the phenomenon of early discourse comprehension and to make a case for the importance of studying and assessing discourse level processing in young children. Speakers must convey their intent in ways that observe conventions and that achieve the desired effect in the listener's mind. Investigations of comprehension of communicative intent quite naturally tend to focus on instances in which intent differs from literal meaning of the linguistic message or where ambiguity of intent exists. Parents also initiate linguistically based playful teasing. Young children are therefore provided with early, frequent practice in inferring nonliteral intent. The Joint Story Retell is essentially a cloze procedure adapted for oral presentation. It is grounded in the assumption that a listener can utilize redundancy in spoken text to retrieve a word or phrase and hence demonstrate comprehension of a surrounding passage, just as is done when implemented in assessment of reading text.
