PURPOSE: Few tools are available to examine the narrative speaking ability of adolescents. Hence, the authors designed a new narrative task and sought to determine whether it would elicit a higher level of syntactic complexity than a conversational task in adolescents with typical language development. METHOD: Forty adolescents (Mage = 14;0 [years;months]; 20 boys and 20 girls) were individually interviewed. Each adolescent participated in a standard conversational task followed by a narrative task that involved listening to fables and retelling the stories. It was predicted that the narrative task would elicit a higher level of syntactic complexity than the conversational task because fables, although superficially simple stories, express rather sophisticated meanings. RESULTS: The narrative task elicited greater syntactic complexity than the conversational task as measured by mean length of C-unit and clausal density. Additionally, the 2 syntactic measures, mean length of C-unit and clausal density, were closely associated on both tasks. CONCLUSION: Fables can elicit a high level of syntactic complexity in adolescents with typical language development. Future studies are needed to build a normative database using fables.
PURPOSE: Few tools are available to examine the narrative speaking ability of adolescents. Hence, the authors designed a new narrative task and sought to determine whether it would elicit a higher level of syntactic complexity than a conversational task in adolescents with typical language development. METHOD: Forty adolescents (Mage = 14;0 [years;months]; 20 boys and 20 girls) were individually interviewed. Each adolescent participated in a standard conversational task followed by a narrative task that involved listening to fables and retelling the stories. It was predicted that the narrative task would elicit a higher level of syntactic complexity than the conversational task because fables, although superficially simple stories, express rather sophisticated meanings. RESULTS: The narrative task elicited greater syntactic complexity than the conversational task as measured by mean length of C-unit and clausal density. Additionally, the 2 syntactic measures, mean length of C-unit and clausal density, were closely associated on both tasks. CONCLUSION: Fables can elicit a high level of syntactic complexity in adolescents with typical language development. Future studies are needed to build a normative database using fables.
Authors: Marie Moore Channell; Susan J Loveall; Frances A Conners; Danielle J Harvey; Leonard Abbeduto Journal: Am J Speech Lang Pathol Date: 2018-02-06 Impact factor: 2.408