Mills Monique T, Mahurin-Smith Jamie, Steele Sara C
The Ohio State University, Columbus.
Illinois State University, Normal.
Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2017 May 17;26(2):511-523. doi: 10.1044/2016_AJSLP-15-0157.
The purpose of this study was to examine rare vocabulary produced in the spoken narratives of school-age African American children.
Forty-three children from general and gifted classrooms produced 2 narratives: a personal story and a fictional story that was based on the wordless book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). The Wordlist for Expressive Rare Vocabulary Evaluation (Mahurin-Smith, DeThorne, & Petrill, 2015) was used to tally number and type of uncommon words produced in these narratives. The authors used t tests and logistic regressions to explore classroom- and narrative-type differences in rare vocabulary production. Correlational analysis determined the relationship between dialect variation and rare vocabulary production.
Findings indicated that tallies of rare-word types were higher in fictional narratives, whereas rare-word density-a measure that controls for narrative length-was greater in personal narratives. Rare-word density distinguished children in general classrooms from those in gifted classrooms. There was no correlation between dialect variation and rare-word density.
Examining school-age African American children's facility with rare vocabulary production appears to be a dialect-neutral way to measure their narrative language and to distinguish gifted children from typically developing children.
本研究旨在考察非裔美国学龄儿童口语叙述中出现的罕见词汇。
来自普通班级和天才班级的43名儿童创作了两篇叙述：一篇个人故事和一篇基于无字书《青蛙，你在哪里？》（梅耶，1969年）创作的虚构故事。使用《表达性罕见词汇评估词表》（马胡林-史密斯、德索恩和佩特里尔，2015年）统计这些叙述中出现的罕见词汇的数量和类型。作者使用t检验和逻辑回归来探究罕见词汇产出在班级类型和叙述类型上的差异。相关分析确定了方言变体与罕见词汇产出之间的关系。
研究结果表明，虚构叙述中罕见词类型的统计数量更高，而个人叙述中罕见词密度（一种控制叙述长度的指标）更大。罕见词密度区分了普通班级的儿童和天才班级的儿童。方言变体与罕见词密度之间没有相关性。
考察非裔美国学龄儿童产出罕见词汇的能力似乎是一种不考虑方言的方式，用以衡量他们的叙述性语言，并区分天才儿童和正常发育儿童。
