Abstract:
Discourse refers to the discussions, talk, conversation or communication on a particular thought, idea or topic. Discourse marks the way of eliciting the verbal output into the most naturalistic way which helps to provide the feedback about the generalized use of the language and its forms. The discourse can be elicited in two ways that includes, firstly, direct discourse that might be over a new or common topic/situation and secondly, it can be cued that is an indirect discourse involving prior set of few processing instructions or cues that might aid the person to perform the discourse. The study intended to investigate if the processing instructions impactedthe verbal output. 10 individuals including same number of males and females between 18 to 25 years of age were considered for the study. 2 topics were chosen on random basis that included films and tourist places. The instructions were given in Kannada. The participant had to spontaneously speak over it without any time delay. Once the individuals stopped, the 11 processing instructions were given for each of the topic. The verbal output was measured in terms of the total number of sentences produced within the verbal output, the number of words in the longest sentence produced, Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), clause-unit for the spontaneous output and the output measured after providing processing instructions. Wilcoxon's signed rank test was used. The results showed the importance of processing instructions on enhancing the verbal output.