Literate Language Features in Spoken Narratives of Children With Typical Language and Children With Language Impairments.

PURPOSE This study focused on literate language features in spoken narratives of school-age children with typical language development and school-age children with language impairments (LI). METHOD The spoken narrative retellings from male and female children aged 7 to 10 years were analyzed. The samples yielded scores for the literate language features of conjunctions, elaborated noun phrases, mental and linguistic verbs, and adverbs. A general language performance measure (number of different words) also was studied. RESULTS Group membership main effects were statistically significant for conjunctions and elaborated noun phrases, with effect sizes ranging from small to moderate. No statistically significant differences were obtained for age level or gender. Correlations between scores for number of different words and scores for the literate language features were low to moderate. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS The measures of conjunctions and elaborated noun phrases differentiated children with LI from those with typical language. When the number of different words was normalized for sample length, support for its use as a general language performance measure was not obtained.

[1]  Marilyn A. Nippold,et al.  Developmental Markers in Adolescent Language , 1993 .

[2]  Chance and Nonsense: A Conversation about Interpreting Tests of Statistical Significance, Part 1. , 1985 .

[3]  Allyssa McCabe,et al.  Developmental Psycholinguistics: Three Ways of Looking at a Child’s Narrative , 1983 .

[4]  Walter Loban,et al.  Language Development: Kindergarten through Grade Twelve. NCTE Committee on Research Report No. 18. , 1976 .

[5]  R. Paul,et al.  Narrative skills in 4-year-olds with normal, impaired, and late-developing language. , 1993, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[6]  Jacob Cohen.  Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 1969, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[7]  Leija V. McReynolds,et al.  Single-subject experimental designs in communicative disorders , 1983 .

[8]  Katharine Perera,et al.  Language acquisition: Language acquisition and writing , 1986 .

[9]  George McCloskey,et al.  Leiter International Performance Scale , 1987 .

[10]  M. Mayer,et al.  One Frog Too Many , 1977 .

[11]  E. Wiig,et al.  Language Assessment and Intervention for the Learning Disabled , 1984 .

[12]  M. R. Novick,et al.  Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores. , 1971 .

[13]  J. Shaver,et al.  Stability of cohesion in the spoken narratives of language-impaired and normally developing school-aged children. , 1991, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[14]  J. Bruner.  Actual minds, possible worlds , 1985 .

[15]  A. Gerber.  Language-Related Learning Disabilities: Their Nature and Treatment , 1993 .

[16]  W. George Scarlett,et al.  When it's only make‐believe: The construction of a boundary between fantasy and reality in storytelling , 1979 .

[17]  B. Thompson.  Improving Research Clarity and Usefulness with Effect Size Indices as Supplements to Statistical Significance Tests , 1999 .

[18]  G. Lyon.  Reading Development, Reading Disorders, And Reading Instruction: Research-Based Findings , 1999 .

[19]  Erica McClure,et al.  A Study of the Use of Conjunctions Across Grades and Ethnic Groups , 1985, Research in the Teaching of English.

[20]  Mercer Mayer,et al.  Frog Goes to Dinner , 1974 .

[21]  E. Peña,et al.  Dynamic Assessment of Narrative and Expository Discourse. , 1999 .

[22]  R. Watkins,et al.  Measuring children's lexical diversity: differentiating typical and impaired language learners. , 1995, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[23]  Mercer Mayer,et al.  A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog , 1979 .

[24]  Bert van Oers.  The fallacy of decontextualization , 1998 .

[25]  G. A. Ferguson,et al.  Statistical analysis in psychology and education , 1960 .

[26]  Mercer Mayer,et al.  Frog, Where Are You? , 1969 .

[27]  J. Stanley,et al.  Educational and Psychological Measurement and Evaluation , 1972 .

[28]  T. Klee.  Developmental and diagnostic characteristics of quantitative measures of children's language production , 1992 .

[29]  C. Snow,et al.  What speech-language pathologists need to know about early reading. , 1999 .

[30]  L. M. Milosky.  Narratives in the classroom , 1987 .