Discourse devices used by language disordered children: a preliminary investigation

Area of Science:

• Child language acquisition
• Developmental psycholinguistics
• Clinical linguistics

Background:

• Children use discourse operations like focus and substitution to connect utterances.
• Normal language development shows a shift from focus to substitution operations over time.
• Understanding these operations in language-disordered children is crucial for developmental insights.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the use of focus and substitution operations in language-disordered children.
• To compare the developmental trajectory of these operations in language-disordered versus typically developing children.
• To determine if language-disordered children's use of these discourse devices differs qualitatively from their peers.

Main Methods:

• Observing spontaneous conversations of three language-disordered children with varying mean length of utterance (MLU).
• Analyzing the frequency and type of focus and substitution operations used by the children.
• Comparing observed patterns to established developmental trends in normally developing children.

Main Results:

• A developmental trend in the use of focus and substitution operations was observed in the language-disordered children.
• This trend mirrored the developmental progression seen in normally developing children.
• The specific MLU of the language-disordered children correlated with their usage patterns.

Conclusions:

• Language-disordered children demonstrate a similar developmental progression in using focus and substitution operations as typically developing children.
• These findings suggest that language-disordered children's ability to learn conversational participation through these devices is not qualitatively impaired.
• The study highlights potential commonalities in the underlying mechanisms of conversational development across different language ability groups.