Spoken expository discourse of children and adolescents: Retelling versus generation

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Author(s)
Westerveld, Marleen F
Moran, Catherine A
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2013
Metadata
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This cross-sectional study investigated the spoken expository discourse skills of children and adolescents elicited in generation and retelling conditions. There were three groups of participants: young school-age children (M췮0 years; n춴); intermediate-school-age children (M챱.3 years; n챸) and high-schoolage students (M챷.6 years; n챸). Participants were asked to generate expository discourse using the favourite game or sport (FGS) task and to retell an expository passage about the game of curling. All samples were transcribed and analysed on measures of verbal productivity (number of utterances), syntactic complexity (mean ...
View more >This cross-sectional study investigated the spoken expository discourse skills of children and adolescents elicited in generation and retelling conditions. There were three groups of participants: young school-age children (M췮0 years; n춴); intermediate-school-age children (M챱.3 years; n챸) and high-schoolage students (M챷.6 years; n챸). Participants were asked to generate expository discourse using the favourite game or sport (FGS) task and to retell an expository passage about the game of curling. All samples were transcribed and analysed on measures of verbal productivity (number of utterances), syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance in T-units [MLU] and clausal density) and verbal fluency (percent maze words). Results indicated that although all age groups produced longer samples in the generation condition, MLU was significantly longer in the retelling condition. The results suggest that the expository retelling task may be a clinically useful addition to a language assessment battery for children and adolescents
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View more >This cross-sectional study investigated the spoken expository discourse skills of children and adolescents elicited in generation and retelling conditions. There were three groups of participants: young school-age children (M췮0 years; n춴); intermediate-school-age children (M챱.3 years; n챸) and high-schoolage students (M챷.6 years; n챸). Participants were asked to generate expository discourse using the favourite game or sport (FGS) task and to retell an expository passage about the game of curling. All samples were transcribed and analysed on measures of verbal productivity (number of utterances), syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance in T-units [MLU] and clausal density) and verbal fluency (percent maze words). Results indicated that although all age groups produced longer samples in the generation condition, MLU was significantly longer in the retelling condition. The results suggest that the expository retelling task may be a clinically useful addition to a language assessment battery for children and adolescents
View less >
Journal Title
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
Volume
27
Issue
9
Copyright Statement
© 2013 Informa Healthcare. This is an electronic version of an article published in Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 27(9), 2013, pp. 720-734. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics is available online at: http://informahealthcare.com with the open URL of your article.
Subject
Clinical sciences
Cognitive and computational psychology
Psycholinguistics (incl. speech production and comprehension)
Linguistics
Applied linguistics and educational linguistics