Measurement of communicative intentions in normally developing children during structured and unstructured contexts

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of sampling context on measurements of communicative intentions expressed by 15 normally developing children during the prelinguistic, one-word, and multiword stages. A communication sample using both structured and unstructured contexts was collected from each subject as he or she interacted with a clinician and parent at each language stage. Direct comparisons were made between the uses of requests and comments during the structured and unstructured sampling contexts. The results indicated that the mean number of requests and comments increased significantly from the prelinguistic to the multiword stage in both contexts. Significantly more requests were used during the structured context, but no significant difference was found between the numbers of comments used in the two contexts. Factors to consider in sampling communication from developmentally young children are discussed.