International journal of language & communication disorders
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Int J Lang Commun Disord · Jan 2000
Conversation versus narration in pre-school children with language impairment.
The study focuses on two elicitation methods for language sampling in children with language impairment: conversation and narration. It has been noted in other studies on different clinical groups that language elicited in different speaking contexts varies in aspects such as MLU, fluency and syntactic complexity. The purpose of this study was to compare genre effects on different aspects of language production in a group of pre-school children with language impairment. ⋯ The narrative task elicited more phrasal expansions and grammatical morphemes per utterance than the conversation. However, the children used more complex verb forms in conversation than in narration. The results are discussed in relation to recent research.