Expository discourse in adolescents with language impairments: examining syntactic development.
OBJECTIVE
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).


METHODS
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.
Nippold
Marilyn A
MA
Communication Disorders and Sciences, College of Education, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. nippold@uoregon.edu
Mansfield
Tracy C
TC
Billow
Jesse L
JL
Tomblin
J Bruce
JB
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*; D008297:Male; D033262:Narration; D013068:Speech Production Measurement