Phyllis Schneider

Effectiveness of teaching story grammar knowledge to pre-school children with language impairment. An exploratory study

Narrative intervention is becoming a common feature in clinical treatment. However, there is a lack of research to support clinicians in their endeavour to provide effective and efficient intervention for children with narrative deficits. For the current study, 13 preschool children with language impairment (ages from 4;8 to 6;4) participated in a narrative intervention programme. Narrative intervention activities explicitly taught story grammar components. A mixed group and single-subject experimental design was used. Two measures of content were used to analyse children’s story productions: story information and episode level. As a group, children included more story information and produced more structurally complex stories following intervention. Single-subject data revealed that half the children showed statistically significant improvements for story information and episode level. Although the results of the study are mixed it is clear that the narrative productions of pre-school children with language impairment improve after narrative intervention. Clinically significant results are discussed along with directions for further research.

Effects of Pictures Versus Orally Presented Stories on Story Retellings by Children With Language Impairment

Narratives can be a useful clinical assessment tool, but some thought must be given to the type of stimuli used to elicit them. For the current study, children with language impairments (ages 5;7–9...

Applying Vygotskian Developmental Theory to Language Intervention

The developmental theory of L.S. Vygotsky is one that is particularly well suited to clinical application. Vygotsky viewed social interaction as essential for the development of individual function...

Effect of pictorial versus oral story presentation on children's use of referring expressions in retell

Young children have been found to use referring expressions less adequately than older children to introduce and maintain reference to characters and objects in their stories. Indirect evidence suggests that this tendency may be stronger when children look at pictures as they retell stories; they may tend to presuppose shared knowledge of information in pictures, even when the listener clearly cannot see the pictures. The present study is an investigation of the effects of presenting stories pictorially versus orally on childrens use of adequate reference. Retellings of stories by 44 children in Kindergarten and Grade 2 were compared when they were presented: (a) orally, (b) through pictures, and (c) both orally and pictorially. An oral version was created for each of 3 picture sets, representing a single complete episode with 2 characters. Oral versions were controlled for length, story units, and language level. Within-subject comparisons revealed main effects for both presentation type and age, and an interaction. The younger children used a higher percentage of adequate reference in the oral-only than the picture-only condition. Older children used high percentages of adequate reference in all conditions. Thus it appears that older children can use referring expressions equally adequately whether they hear stories or view pictures, while younger children do not use adequate reference when they only view pictures and must formulate the story themselves.

Interaction between Children with Developmental Delays and their Mothers during a Book‐sharing Activity

Mothers and their preschool children with developmental delays participated in a storybook activity. Data analysis focused on the relations between maternal and child behaviours in the activity. Several aspects of mothers’ behaviour were related to childrens engagement and responsiveness during the task. The more responsive and engaged the child, the more the mother attempted to involve the child in the book activity. Interviews indicated that childrens positive attitude towards reading was associated with frequency of reading activity. We conclude that mothers were sensitive to their childrens developmental levels and organized the activity in ways appropriate to the childs ability and willingness to participate.

Children's ability to restore the referential cohesion of stories

Childrens ability to restore discourse cohesion was examined in three experiments. Children of 5, 7 and 10 years heard stories containing referring expressions that constituted inappropriate first or subsequent mentions of referents from the point of view of story cohesion. They were asked to retell these stories (Experiment I), to repeat verbatim some clauses extracted from them on line (Experiment II), as well as to actively detect and judge anomalies on line (Experiment III). Childrens retellings and their integrative repetition errors in Experiments I and II show that they could modify inappropriate expressions into appropriate ones at all ages, despite age differences suggesting an increasing tendency to link NPs in discourse after 5 years. In comparison, only the 10-year-olds could explicitly comment on anomalies in Experiment III. In conclusion, children show a surprisingly early ability to restore cohesion, an increasingly automatized reliance on discourse context with age, and a late metalinguistic awareness of the cohesive functions of different noun phrase types.

Differentiating School-Aged Children With and Without Language Impairment Using Tense and Grammaticality Measures From a Narrative Task

PURPOSE To determine the diagnostic accuracy of the finite verb morphology composite (FVMC), number of errors per C-unit (Errors/CU), and percent grammatical C-units (PGCUs) in differentiating school-aged children with language impairment (LI) and those with typical language development (TL). METHOD Participants were 61 six-year-olds (50 TL, 11 LI) and 67 eight-year-olds (50 TL, 17 LI). Narrative samples were collected using a story-generation format. FVMC, Errors/CU, and PGCUs were computed from the samples. RESULTS All of the three measures showed acceptable to good diagnostic accuracy at age 6, but only PGCUs showed acceptable diagnostic accuracy at age 8 when sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios were considered. CONCLUSION FVMC, Errors/CU, and PGCUs can all be used in combination with other tools to identify school-aged children with LI. However, FVMC and Errors/CU may be an appropriate diagnostic tool up to age 6. PGCUs, in contrast, may be a sensitive tool for identifying children with LI at least up to age 8 years.

Cohesion and coherence anomalies and their effects on children’s referent introduction in Narrative retell

A growing number of studies have examined children’s narrative development, focusing on two related but distinct aspects of narrative organisation. Some have reported developmental progressions in children’s ability to construct discourse cohesion, as shown for example by their uses of linguistic devices to mark the status of information in discourse as a function of mutual knowledge. Others have focused on the coherence of children’s narratives, i.e., their ability to construct a cognitive “schema” when representing complex event sequences. Little is known, however, about the relation between these two aspects of narrative organisation, which have been often confounded in previous research, as well as their potential interaction during narrative development. The aim of the present study is to determine children’s sensitivity to both cohesion and coherence, by examining how they retell stories containing anomalies which violated either the expected cohesive sequence of referring expressions or the canonical structure of stories. Particular attention is placed on disentangling the potential impact of these two types of violations on how children use referring expressions for referent introductions.

Language sample analysis: development of a valid language assessment tool and determining the reliability of outcome measures for Farsi-speaking children

Abstract The present study determined how to elicit language samples from Farsi-speaking children, which language measures should be analysed, and whether these analyses are reliable. Two valid sets of picture stories were developed to elicit the language samples. Language measures were chosen by a panel of experts and the reliability of the measures was verified by test–retest reliability. The subjects were children 5–6 years of age (N = 30) who told stories twice at a 7–10 day interval. The results of inter-rater reliability showed that consistency of measurement was high for the transcription and analysis of the stories. The results of test–retest reliability showed there was a correlation between most variables in the longer samples (p < .05). This study demonstrates that language ability can be more reliably assessed when longer language samples are collected.

Exploring how preschoolers who stutter use spoken language during free play: A feasibility study

Abstract Purpose: Play is critically important for the healthy development of children. This study explored the viability of a methodology to investigate how preschoolers who stutter use language in play with peers. Method: Transcripts of peer-directed utterances of four preschoolers who stutter and four matched non-stuttering children during free play were analysed for measures of verbal output (numbers of utterances and words), length and complexity of utterances (mean length of communication unit and syntactic complexity), and lexical diversity (number of different words, type token ratio and vocd). Result: Viable speech samples were obtained. Verbal output scores of two children who stutter were the same or higher than their matched controls whereas mean length of communication unit and syntactic complexity scores for three children who stutter were lower than their matched controls. In 22 of the 24 comparisons across number of different words, type token ratio, and vocd, scores of children who stutter were the same or higher than their matched controls. Conclusion: Interpretation of data is limited by the small sample size and lack of standardised testing. However, results indicate that the methodology has promise for future research into the way preschoolers who stutter use spoken language during play and the quality of their play.