STYLISTIC SPEECH ADJUSTMENTS OF LANGUAGE-IMPAIRED AND NORMAL-LANGUAGE CHILDREN

MARC EUGENE FEY, Purdue University

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature which suggests that, by the age of 4, children show signs of a rapidly developing ability to modify their speech to different listeners. A number of systematic modifications in the content and form of preschool children's messages have been observed in apparent attempts to accommodate the listener's lack of common visual perspective, lack of shared information, age, attentiveness and knowledge of the world, cognitive/linguistic abilities and social responsiveness. The present investigation was an attempt to determine whether preschool-age children with specific language impairments make similar speech style adjustments based on the age of the listener. Six specifically language-impaired children, ranging in age from 4 years, 7 months to 6 years, 2 months, took part in free play, dyadic interactions with three unfamiliar partners referred to as listeners. The listeners were a mother, a same-age mate and a 19- to 28-month-old baby. Two groups of six normal-language children, who participated in dyadic interactions under identical conditions, served as controls. The children in the first group were similar in both chronological and mental age but superior in expressive language skills to the language-impaired children. The children in the second group ranged in age from 2 years, 11 months to 3 years, 5 months but were similar to the language-impaired children in expressive language abilities. The inclusion of the latter group was especially significant since normal-language children as young as this have not been observed in previous studies of speech style adjustments based on listener age. The results indicated that the language-impaired children made listener-based modifications in their levels of conversational participation and in the content and function of their utterances that were equivalent to the adjustments made by the same-age normal-language subjects. In so doing, they demonstrated sensitivity to changes in age-related listener characteristics and an ability to modify their own conversational behaviors to, at least partially, accommodate those changes. Both of these groups of children appeared to recognize that, with younger listeners, they were required to assume greater responsibility for regulating the interaction and controlling the behavior of the listener. Two general measures of syntactic complexity, however, revealed that the language-impaired children made no adjustments in the complexity of their utterances to the different listeners. The same-age normal-language children, on the other hand, used simpler utterances when addressing the babies compared to speech to peers or adults. It is argued that the failure of the language-impaired children to make such modifications was due to their inability to draw upon sufficient syntactic resources rather than a lack of awareness that such adjustments were necessary. The implications of these findings for (1) language intervention procedures; (2) the education of language-impaired children; and (3) a better understanding of the normal development of conversational skills are discussed. In contrast to the older groups, three of the six 3-year-old subjects failed to engage their baby listeners in any form of social interaction and were, as a result, excluded from the analyses. The three remaining subjects, who were actually superior to the language-impaired subjects in expressive language ability, made relatively few modifications in their speech to the different listeners. The developmental relationship between formal linguistic skills and the social skills necessary to implement them appropriately in social contexts is discussed in view of this finding.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Speech therapy

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