Mathers Margaret
School of Language and Media, Faculty of Education and Arts, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia.
Clin Linguist Phon. 2005 Apr-May;19(3):215-25. doi: 10.1080/02699200410001698643.
This paper reports early findings from a wider study that sought to test the hypothesis that differences in language use exist between children who have a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and their non-ADHD peers. Twenty-two, 8 to 12 year-old children (11 with a diagnosis of ADHD and 11 matched peers) comprised the community-based sample. There were nine boys and two girls in each group. All the children were ranked at least average for their language ability on standardised language testing. This case-control study used an approach derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to examine and then compare spoken and written elicited language samples. SFL was thought to be particularly suitable because of its potential to richly describe language in use while taking contextual variation into account. Statistically significant overall differences between the subject and the control groups were found for the measure of grammatical intricacy (GI). Further analyses revealed these differences to be largely attributed to differences between group scores for written material. Discussion explores the potential relevance of these findings to the clinical evaluation of language ability in young school-aged children who have been diagnosed with ADHD.
本文报告了一项更广泛研究的早期结果，该研究旨在验证一个假设，即被诊断患有注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）的儿童与其未患ADHD的同龄人在语言使用上存在差异。22名8至12岁的儿童（11名被诊断患有ADHD，11名匹配的同龄人）构成了基于社区的样本。每组有9名男孩和2名女孩。所有儿童在标准化语言测试中的语言能力排名至少为平均水平。这项病例对照研究采用了源自系统功能语言学（SFL）的方法来检查并比较口头和书面引出式语言样本。SFL被认为特别合适，因为它有潜力在考虑语境变化的同时丰富地描述使用中的语言。在语法复杂性（GI）测量方面，发现实验组和对照组之间存在总体上具有统计学意义的差异。进一步分析表明，这些差异在很大程度上归因于书面材料组分数之间的差异。讨论探讨了这些发现与被诊断患有ADHD的低龄学童语言能力临床评估的潜在相关性。
