Mun Oz Maria L, Gillam Ronald B, Pen A Elizabeth D, Gulley-Faehnle Annette
The University of Texas, Austin.
Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch. 2003 Oct 1;34(4):332-342. doi: 10.1044/0161-1461(2003/027).
This preliminary study was designed to determine whether commonly used measures of language productivity, sentence organization, and story structure were sensitive to developmental differences in narratives produced by Latino preschool children from a low-socioeconomic status (SES) community.
Twenty-four children, divided equally into younger and older groups, produced oral narratives that corresponded with the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). Their narratives were analyzed for productivity (total number of words, total number of different words), sentence organization (number of utterances, mean length of C unit in words, and percentage of grammatically acceptable utterances), and story structure (complete and incomplete narrative episodes).
The length of children's narratives did not differ significantly by age. However, older Latino children produced stories that contained longer sentences, a higher proportion of grammatically acceptable sentences, and more complete episodes than did younger children.
These results suggest that measures of language productivity (such as total number of words and number of different words) that reflect developmental differences in monolingual mainstream preschoolers may not be sensitive indicators of narrative language development in young Latino children from low-SES environments. However, measures of syntactic accuracy and episodic structure are likely to be valid indicators of developmental changes in these children's narrative abilities.
本初步研究旨在确定常用的语言产出、句子组织和故事结构测量方法，是否对来自低社会经济地位（SES）社区的拉丁裔学龄前儿童所生成叙事中的发展差异敏感。
24名儿童被平均分为年幼组和年长组，他们生成了与无字图画书《青蛙，你在哪里？》（梅耶，1969年）相对应的口头叙事。对他们的叙事进行了产出分析（单词总数、不同单词总数）、句子组织分析（话语数量、C单位的平均单词长度以及语法可接受话语的百分比）和故事结构分析（完整和不完整的叙事情节）。
儿童叙事的长度在年龄上没有显著差异。然而，年长的拉丁裔儿童生成的故事比年幼儿童包含更长的句子、更高比例的语法可接受句子以及更完整的情节。
这些结果表明反映单语主流学龄前儿童发展差异的语言产出测量方法（如单词总数和不同单词数量），可能不是低SES环境中拉丁裔幼儿叙事语言发展的敏感指标。然而，句法准确性和情节结构测量方法可能是这些儿童叙事能力发展变化的有效指标。
