Intellectual Disabilities and Narratives from Personal Experience: Storytelling in Oral Discourse

Abstract

This article examines oral narratives of the personal experiences by young adults with mild intellectual disability. These narratives have been collected as semi-structured interviews and multi-party conversations. At that moment all the storytellers were involved in an assisted living project promoted by an NGO that enabled them to have left specialized institutions. Most of the informants are close to functional illiteracy due to a lack or the inadequacy of their schooling. The example analysed in the article falls into the category of life story narrative on the horrors of lived experience in a family or in an institution. The storytellers only rarely needed to represent themselves out of the circle of their own group and social workers, and the stories told appear to have circulated within this circle. We analysed the narrative discourse and arrived at the conclusion that for the storytellers under consideration, the main means to tell the story is to animate the plot, translating it into a dialog between the characters that is quoted in direct speech. We highlighted the key framing expressions and discourse markers used by the storytellers observed. Some types of framing expressions, usually reflecting the attitude of the storyteller, were absent in the stories. The narratives also demonstrate the tendency to use relations of coordination, while not using subordination to express causal meanings. However, the observations proposed in the paper cannot be interpreted as particular features of storytelling by the intellectually disabled, because no systematic comparative study has been performed involving stories by intellectually intact people with comparative experiences of socialization in specialized institutions.