A common way to examine children's language production is to analyze their narrative ability, which has been observed in several studies in various languages. The present study aims to analyze Swedish children's stories at microstructural level (grammatical and utterance level) and macrostructural level (discourse level) and examine how these results differ between two narrative elicitation methods. Furthermore, the study aims to investigate if the results from Swedish and English speaking children differ between these two elicitation methods. The present study involved 40 typically developing children aged 7;0–8;11 years with Swedish as their native language from southeastern Sweden. The two narrative elicitation methods used were personal narrative generation and fictional narrative retell. During personal narrative generation the participants were prompted to share their own experiences based on given themes with image support. In the fictional narrative retell participants were asked to retell the tale "Frog, Where are you?" (Mayer, 1969). The participants' two stories were transcribed in the program Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) and analyzed at micro- and macrostructural level. At the microstructural level the following measures were investigated: Total utterances (TU), Mean Length of Utterance in Words (MLU-w), Type Token Ratio (TTR), Percentage of Maze Words (PcMw), Overgeneralization Errors (EO) and Total Number of Words (TNW). For macrostructural analysis the Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) was used. At the microstructural level participants achieved higher MLU-w, TTR and PcMw in the fictional narrative retell than in personal narrative generation. TNW and MLU-w correlated with participants' age at fictional narrative retell. The participants generated higher values regarding TU and TNW in personal narrative generation. Analysis of the macrostructure showed that the majority of the participants achieved higher scores in fictional narrative retell than in personal narrative generation. The results regarding the macrostructural level of the fictional narrative retell correlated with the age of the participants. Similar trends between the elicitation methods appeared in the English-speaking participants.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-131122 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Forsell, Hampus, Björsand, Marcus |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för klinisk och experimentell medicin |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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