Expository Language Skills of Young School-Age Children

Abstract

PURPOSE: 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. METHOD: 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. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that expository discourse sampling may be a useful addition to a language assessment protocol, even for very young school-age children.

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