Impact of Discourse Type and Elicitation Task on Language Sampling Outcomes

Area of Science:

• Speech and Language Pathology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Assessment

Background:

• Language sampling is crucial for evaluating language development in children.
• Variations in elicitation techniques can influence the quality and characteristics of collected language samples.
• Understanding these impacts is vital for accurate language assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how different discourse types (narrative vs. expository) and elicitation tasks (generation vs. retell) affect key language sampling outcomes.
• To analyze the impact of these variations on sample length, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity.
• To examine developmental trends in these outcomes across K-3 grades.

Main Methods:

• Collected eight spoken language samples from 1,037 K-3 students across four conditions: expository generation, expository retell, narrative generation, and narrative retell.
• Audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed samples for total words, different words, mean length of utterance in words (MLUW), and Subordination Index (SI).

Main Results:

• Expository generation and narrative retell tasks yielded the largest samples with the greatest lexical diversity.
• Expository conditions showed higher MLUW, while narrative conditions had a higher mean SI.
• Both narrative retell and expository generation tasks resulted in the highest mean syntactic complexity scores.

Conclusions:

• The choice of language sampling procedure directly influences sample length, lexical diversity, utterance length, and syntactic complexity.
• These findings have significant implications for clinicians selecting appropriate methods for language assessments.
• Developmental differences in language complexity become less pronounced between second and third grade.