Madeline Peterson; Alison Barlow; Natalie Green; Madison Horrocks, Utah State University
Children with Language Disorder tend to demonstrate significant difficulty using multiple clause sentences. They often have difficulty using relative clauses. Kim and O’Grady, (2015) compared 46 children ages 5;0 to 6;10 in their use of relative clauses. Findings revealed that children tended to favor subject relative clauses (i.e. the boy who has the bike is happy) over object relative clauses (i.e. the boy has a bike that is broken). Domsch et al., (2012) used conversational and narrative contexts to elicit discourse-level language from children to examine syntactic complexity for students with and without a history of late language emergence (LLE). They found that typically developing children outperformed children with a history of LLE in use of syntactically complex sentences during conversation, but not in narratives obtained from the contexts used in the standardized test (Domsch et. al, 2012). Our current study’s goal was to extend findings from previous research in typically developing children by using narratives as the context for eliciting and examining the use of complex syntax. We studied the syntactic complexity of narratives of 260 typically developing children ages 4 to 7. These children were given 3 narrative tasks during the TNL assessment which included retelling a story, composing a story from sequenced pictures, and producing a story from a single picture. All three tasks were used in order to explore potential differences in story contexts. The narratives were transcribed and coded by student researchers who were at least 90% reliable using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT; Miller, 2010). The syntactic complexity of these narratives was analyzed by coding for Subordination Index (SI) and the use of relative clauses. SI is a ratio of the number independent clauses to the number of C-units (i.e. independent main clauses and phrases/clauses subordinated to it) in each transcript. Subject and object relative clauses were identified and coded in each sample. It was expected that younger children would use fewer relative clauses than older children and prefer subject relative to object relative clauses. We hypothesized that children would use more complex syntax and relative clauses in sequenced scenes or retells as compared to those from a single picture. Implications for examining each context separately, rather than collapsing them are discussed. Data are discussed by age-group. Implications for how these data will inform our identification of students with language impairment by assessment of complex syntax will be discussed.