Examining School-Age Children's Use of Rare Words in Expository Discourse: Applications of Computerized Analysis
Abstract
In the school-age years, children use varied discourse styles to convey information. In addition to conversational and narrative discourse, they learn to use expository discourse to explain complex topics. Previous studies have found that compared to conversation, expository discourse samples are generally more syntactically complex (Lundine et al., 2018; Nippold et al., 2005). In addition, the vocabulary used in expository discourse may be more advanced than that in other discourse types. One way to explore vocabulary use in discourse is to measure the rarity of words within samples of discourse. The purpose of this study was to compare typically developing school-age children’s use of rare words between expository generation, expository retell, and conversational samples and examine if their rare word use was correlated with their scores on standardized language assessments. Language samples were collected from a convenience sample of twenty-six school-age children who were considered typically developing. Nippold’s favorite game or sport (FGS) task was used to elicit expository generation samples (Nippold et al., 2005). For expository retell, the children were shown a scientific video and asked to explain its content. The Wordlist for Expressive Rare Vocabulary Evaluation (WERVE; Mahurin-Smith et al., 2015) and a second rare word list generated from the word frequency dataset SUBTLEX (Brysbaert & New, 2009), a movie subtitle corpus, were used to measure lexical rarity. Results showed that across measures, expository retell samples had a significantly greater number of rare words compared to generation and conversational samples. There was no significant correlation between rare word use and language assessment scores. Overall, the findings indicated that children used more advanced vocabulary when retelling complex content from a video, compared to sharing information about a familiar activity or participating in conversation.
Subject Area
Speech therapy|Language
Recommended Citation
Pedroza, Serena Jae, "Examining School-Age Children's Use of Rare Words in Expository Discourse: Applications of Computerized Analysis" (2024). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI31295657.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI31295657