engleski

Analyses of written narratives in typical and language-impaired adolescents

BACKGROUND. Children who struggle with language development are likely to be less proficient writers throughout their formal education. Findings indeed indicate that young DLD writers produce short texts with poor lexical diversity, numerous errors and with lack of adequate content elements (Bishop & Clarkson, 2003 ; Dockrell et al., 2009). This inferior performance is attributed to their weak language abilities in spelling, vocabulary and morphology. Nevertheless, studies have mostly included languages with deep orthography. AIMS. Current study aimed to compare narrative texts written by TD and DLD school-aged children in Croatian, a language with highly transparent orthographic system. Several variables were analysed: length, content, cohesion, coherence and errors. Moreover, to determine what differentiates writing skills in school period and in adulthood, texts of TD adolescents and TD adults were also compared. We hypothesised that TD students would outperform DLD students, and that TD students would perform similarly to TD adults. METHOD. Three groups were included in the study: 21 DLD and 21 TD children (ages 12-15), and 22 TD adults (ages 23-59). They all completed the Beach Story narrative-writing task (Bishop, 2004). Hand-written narratives were transcribed into CLAN and assessed by two independent raters. RESULTS. Comparison of narratives written by DLD and TD students confirms differences in length (t=-3.04 ; p=0.00), cohesion (t=-3.16 ; p=0.00), content (t=-5.12 ; p=0.00) and amount of morpho-syntactic errors (t=3.54 ; p=0.01). Comparison of TD students and adults shows differences only in the use of sophisticated vocabulary (t=-3.12 ; p=0.00). CONCLUSION. DLD students write shorter and less cohesive texts and produce more errors than TD ones, which suggests that the former demonstrate similar profiles in writing competence regardless of the orthographic system. Moreover, TD adolescents and TD adults differ in the use of vocabulary implying that it continues to develop into adulthood.

Writing skills ; Narrative ; Developmental language disorder ; Transparent orthography

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