Performance on creative narrative tasks of children treated for acute lymphocytic leukaemia

Twenty-three children who had completed treatment for acute lymphocytic leukaemia (ALL) and 23 ageand sex-matched non-neurologically impaired controls generated a creative narrative in response to a character figurine. Story grammar, intersentential cohesion and developmental level were examined. No significant differences were found between the performance of the ALL group and the matched controls on the majority of the measures of narrative ability examined. The control subjects did, however, produce more episodes containing initiating events than the leukaemia group.