Orientation to time, place, and person is a central aspect of cognitive functioning. Measures of orientation, as employed in the psychiatric mental status examination, evaluate the accuracy of orientation in present awareness, and are applicable only to severely disturbed psychiatric populations in whom obvious deficits would be expected. The method for orientation measurement developed here focuses on the orientation process in memory as shown in the narration of past personal experience, rather than on present status, and may be applied to normal as well as pathological subject populations. The pattern and latency of orientation to time, place, and person were measured in a brief narrative speech sample for 53 normal and 22 psychiatric subjects. Orientation scoring was based on a reference to oneself in relation to each of the three orientation dimensions (time, place, person). The orientation latency score reflected the proportion of narrative length at which orientation on all three dimensions first occurred in a given narrative. Pattern of orientation was defined as the rank order in which the first coded reference to time, place, and person occurred in the narrative. Referential activity and affective flattening were also scored. The results indicated that orientation pattern was highly systematic for the normals but not for the clinical sample. For all subjects, orientation latency was significantly related to measures of sensory imaginal and affective expression, suggesting a relationship between the cognitive and affective spheres. Fine discriminations in orientation pattern and latency in the inpatient group may have important diagnostic and prognostic implications that are not measured in traditional mental status assessment procedures. (Author/NRB)