title: Expository language skills of young school-age children.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This research investigated the expository language skills of young school-age children with the ultimate aim of obtaining normative data for clinical practice. Specifically, this study examined (a) the level of expository language performance of 6- and 7-year-old children with typical development and (b) age-related differences between young and older school-age children.
  
  
  METHODS
  Expository discourse was elicited from two groups of children using the favorite game or sport (FGS) task. Performance of the younger age group (n=61), age 6;0 (years;months) to 7;11, was compared to that of a group of twenty 11-year-old children from an earlier study. Samples were analyzed on measures of verbal productivity, syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and verbal fluency.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The FGS task was effective in eliciting text-level discourse from young school-age children. These children produced discourse that resulted in a fairly normal distribution across some of the language production measures. Age-related differences were observed on measures of verbal productivity, grammatical accuracy, and verbal fluency, but not on syntactic complexity.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The findings suggest that expository discourse sampling may be a useful addition to a language assessment protocol, even for very young school-age children.
authors.affiliation: Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. m.westerveld@gmail.com
authors.forename: Marleen F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Westerveld
authors.forename: Catherine A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Moran
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D012016:Reference Values; D012574:Schools