Examining Adolescent Language Performance in Discourse Production Across Four Elicitation Tasks

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Comprehensive spoken language assessment requires evaluating language in naturalistic contexts.
• Discourse elicitation and analysis are key methods for assessing naturalistic language use.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe adolescents' language performance across four distinct elicitation tasks.
• To identify task-related differences in adolescent spoken language production.

Main Methods:

• Forty-four typically developing adolescents (ages 12-17) completed four spoken discourse tasks: picture story generation, fable retell, personal narratives, and moral dilemma responses.
• Language productivity, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and verbal facility were analyzed from transcribed responses.

Main Results:

• Language performance measures differed significantly across the four tasks.
• Personal narrative tasks produced longer samples and higher verbal fluency.
• Fable retell and moral dilemma tasks showed higher lexical diversity and syntactic complexity.

Conclusions:

• Task characteristics influence adolescent language performance.
• Findings inform speech-language pathologists in selecting appropriate discourse tasks for comprehensive spoken language assessments.
• Case examples illustrate clinical decision-making for task selection.