Journal article
Expository Discourse in Adolescents With Language Impairments: Examining Syntactic Development
American journal of speech-language pathology, Vol.17(4), pp.356-366
11/2008
DOI: 10.1044/1058-0360(2008/07-0049)
PMID: 18840698
Abstract
Purpose This study examined syntactic development in a large cohort of adolescents. At kindergarten, each participant had been identified as having specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), or typical language development (TLD).
Method The participants (n = 444) had a mean age of 13;11 (years;months; range = 12;10–15;5). Language samples were elicited in 2 genres, conversational and expository, and analyzed for mean length of T-unit and subordinate clause production.
Results Mean length of T-unit and the use of nominal, relative, and adverbial clauses were greater during the expository task than the conversational task for all groups. Thus, even the SLI and NLI groups produced longer sentences containing greater amounts of subordination when speaking in the expository genre than in the conversational genre. No group differences were revealed by the conversational task. However, on the expository task, the TLD group outperformed both the SLI and NLI groups on mean length of T-unit, and the TLD group outperformed the NLI group on relative clause use.
Conclusions Speech-language pathologists may wish to employ expository discourse tasks rather than conversational tasks to examine syntactic development in adolescents.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Expository Discourse in Adolescents With Language Impairments: Examining Syntactic Development
- Creators
- Marilyn A Nippold - University of Oregon, EugeneTracy C Mansfield - University of Oregon, EugeneJesse L Billow - University of Oregon, EugeneJ. Bruce Tomblin - University of Iowa, Iowa City
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- American journal of speech-language pathology, Vol.17(4), pp.356-366
- DOI
- 10.1044/1058-0360(2008/07-0049)
- PMID
- 18840698
- ISSN
- 1058-0360
- eISSN
- 1558-9110
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 11/2008
- Academic Unit
- Communication Sciences and Disorders; Iowa Neuroscience Institute
- Record Identifier
- 9984071953002771
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