School of Health Sciences and Social Work, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch. 2024 Jul;55(3):838-852. doi: 10.1044/2024_LSHSS-23-00163. Epub 2024 May 15.
Comprehensive spoken language assessment should include the evaluation of language use in naturalistic contexts. Discourse elicitation and analysis provides the opportunity for such an evaluation to occur. In this article, our overall aim was to describe adolescents' language performance on four elicitation tasks and determine if there are task-related differences across the elicitation tasks.
Forty-four typically developing adolescents with ages ranging from 12;2 to 17;11 (years;months; 15;2; 21 boys and 23 girls) participated in the study. They completed four spoken discourse tasks: (a) story generation using a wordless picture book, (b) fable retell, (c) six personal narratives in response to emotion-based prompts, and (d) monologic response to two stories that contained a moral dilemma. Responses were transcribed and analyzed for four language performance measures tapping into language productivity, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and verbal facility.
Despite individual variability in performance, mean scores were close to median scores for most measures, suggesting a symmetrical distribution. As expected, all four language performance measures were significantly different across the four elicitation tasks. The personal narrative task elicited the longest samples, with the highest verbal fluency. In contrast, both lexical diversity and syntactic complexity were the strongest in response to the fable retell and the moral dilemma tasks.
This investigation provides speech-language pathologists with an overview of how task-related factors may impact adolescent language performance. These findings may be used to support their clinical decision-making processes in choosing a suitable discourse task when conducting a comprehensive spoken language assessment. Three hypothetical case examples are used to illustrate the decision-making process.
全面的口语评估应包括对自然语境下语言使用的评估。话语引出和分析为此类评估提供了机会。本文的总体目的是描述青少年在四项引出任务中的语言表现，并确定这些引出任务之间是否存在与任务相关的差异。
44 名年龄在 12 岁 2 个月至 17 岁 11 个月（岁、月；15 岁 2 个月；21 名男孩和 23 名女孩）之间的典型发展青少年参与了这项研究。他们完成了四项口语话语任务：（a）使用无字图画书生成故事，（b）寓言复述，（c）对基于情感的提示做出六个人物叙述，以及（d）对包含道德困境的两个故事做出独白反应。对四个语言表现指标的反应进行了转录和分析，这些指标分别涉及语言产出、句法复杂性、词汇多样性和言语流畅性。
尽管表现存在个体差异，但大多数指标的平均得分接近中位数得分，表明分布呈对称状态。如预期的那样，四项语言表现指标在四项引出任务中均有显著差异。个人叙述任务引出的样本最长，言语流畅性最高。相比之下，在寓言复述和道德困境任务中，词汇多样性和句法复杂性最强。
本研究为言语语言病理学家提供了一个概述，说明任务相关因素如何影响青少年的语言表现。这些发现可用于支持他们在进行全面口语评估时选择合适话语任务的临床决策过程。使用三个假设案例来说明决策过程。
