Effects of Scriptedness on Children's Generation of Expository Narratives
The effects of scriptedness upon expository narrative generation were examined. Children, ranging in age from three to nine years old, were seen individually for two sessions. It was hypothesized that the effects of scriptedness would vary across age levels. Tests for language and cognitive abilities were adminstered in the first session to confirm teacher report of normal development. In the second session, the children were asked to give instructions for eight tasks, four scripted and four unscripted, to a confederate child. Language was transcribed and measures of linguistic complexity and accuracy were calculated. There was a significant main effect for scriptedness in all age groups. Some performance measures too included the occurance of mazes, type-token ratio, and pronoun use, reflected developmental trends, indicating different effects for scriptedness across age levels. These findings have important implications for speech-language pathologists who use language sampling as an assessment tool.
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