title: The effects of expansions, questions and cloze procedures on children's conversational skills.
abstract: The effectiveness of expansion as a technique for facilitating children's language and conversational skills is well known (Scherer and Olswang, 1984). Expansion, however, can appear alone or in combination with other techniques. Using a repeated measures design, this study aimed to compare the effects of expansion alone (EA); expansion combined with wh-questions (EQ); and expansion followed by a cloze procedure (EC) on the conversational skills of eight preschool children with conversational difficulties. Results showed that while there were no significant differences in child verbal topic maintaining responses across all techniques, EA elicited a significantly higher number of topic extensions, more non-verbal topic maintaining responses and fewer 'non-relevant responses' from the children, than either EQ or EC. The positive effects of each technique on the pragmatic appropriateness in conversations suggest that they could be used strategically in language intervention to ensure greater therapeutic effect.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Disorders, New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behavior, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. tze-peng.wong@pg.canterbury.ac.nz
authors.forename: Tze-Peng
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Moran
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Foster-Cohen
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000628:therapy*; D007808:Language Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D016896:Treatment Outcome