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Understanding the structure of discourse in healthy adults is fundamental to the assessment and diagnosis of discourse level impairments in clinical populations and the development of effective treatment regimes. Exploring discourse genre in healthy speakers that extend beyond the traditional narrative is equally paramount in facilitating maximum impact of clinical interventions in everyday speaking contexts. This study aimed to characterise the discourse of 30 healthy adult speakers across three age groups (20–39, 40–59 and 60+ years) and four discourse genres (recount, procedural, exposition and narrative), drawing on discourse frameworks used in classroom teaching. A clinically useful discourse protocol and analytic procedure using SALT was developed that profiled the macrostructure and key aspects of linguistic microstructure of the different genres, exploring coherence and cohesion within and across …