The use of the Renfrew Bus Story with 5-8-year-old Australian children

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Accepted Manuscript (AM)
Author(s)
Westerveld, Marleen
Vidler, Kath
Year published
2015
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Purpose : Research into the language sampling practices of Australian speech pathologists suggests the Bus Story Test is a frequently used standardized tool for eliciting story retelling samples for screening, diagnosis, goal-setting, and progress monitoring purposes. Because this task has not been normed on an Australian population, this study investigated the usefulness of the Bus Story for young school-age Australian children. Method : In total, 125 Australian primary-school children (aged 5;3 - 8;9) participated in the Bus Story task. Children attending Year 2 also retold the story Frog Where Are You . Children ' s ...
View more >Purpose : Research into the language sampling practices of Australian speech pathologists suggests the Bus Story Test is a frequently used standardized tool for eliciting story retelling samples for screening, diagnosis, goal-setting, and progress monitoring purposes. Because this task has not been normed on an Australian population, this study investigated the usefulness of the Bus Story for young school-age Australian children. Method : In total, 125 Australian primary-school children (aged 5;3 - 8;9) participated in the Bus Story task. Children attending Year 2 also retold the story Frog Where Are You . Children ' s performance was analysed for measures of information and sentence length ( Bus Story only), story length, MLU, number of different words and clausal density. Result : Performance on the Bus Story improved with year-of-schooling for all measures. Between 21 - 64% of the children performed below expectations on information or length scores when using the published norms. The retell task Frog Where Are You elicited longer samples, containing a higher number of different words. Conclusion : Using the published Bus Story norms will potentially result in over- identifi cation of language impairment. The retell task Frog Where Are You may provide a useful alternative for assessing young school-aged children ' s story retelling ability.
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View more >Purpose : Research into the language sampling practices of Australian speech pathologists suggests the Bus Story Test is a frequently used standardized tool for eliciting story retelling samples for screening, diagnosis, goal-setting, and progress monitoring purposes. Because this task has not been normed on an Australian population, this study investigated the usefulness of the Bus Story for young school-age Australian children. Method : In total, 125 Australian primary-school children (aged 5;3 - 8;9) participated in the Bus Story task. Children attending Year 2 also retold the story Frog Where Are You . Children ' s performance was analysed for measures of information and sentence length ( Bus Story only), story length, MLU, number of different words and clausal density. Result : Performance on the Bus Story improved with year-of-schooling for all measures. Between 21 - 64% of the children performed below expectations on information or length scores when using the published norms. The retell task Frog Where Are You elicited longer samples, containing a higher number of different words. Conclusion : Using the published Bus Story norms will potentially result in over- identifi cation of language impairment. The retell task Frog Where Are You may provide a useful alternative for assessing young school-aged children ' s story retelling ability.
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Journal Title
International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
Copyright Statement
© 2015 Taylor & Francis. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology on Volume 17, 2015 - Issue 3, available online: https://doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2015.1024168
Note
This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advanced Online Version.
Subject
Clinical sciences
Clinical sciences not elsewhere classified
Cognitive and computational psychology
Psycholinguistics (incl. speech production and comprehension)
Linguistics