Date of Award

2024-05-01

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Speech-Lang/Pathology

Advisor(s)

Stacy Wagovich

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 childrenâ??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. Nippoldâ??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.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

56 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Serena Jae Pedroza

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