Some syntactic aspects of the oral language of 20
mildly intellectually handicapped, 20 normal seven year
old and 20 normal ten year old children were examined
in order to determine the comparative development of
the mildly intellectually handicapped children and some
of the difficulties they might experience. The language
was classified into 24 categories for various types of
analysis. These types included traditional counts and
an examination of the types of subordination as well as
of non-conventional usage. In addition, Developmental Sentence Scoring (Lee : 1974) was used to assess the
maturity of personal pronoun and main and secondary
verb usage. The sentence repetition technique was
employed as a means of assessing competence in a variety
of later-developing structures. Questions were designed
to assess ability in other specific syntactic areas.
Analysis of variance was used to compare group scores
and determine if any significant differences occurred.
Several significant differences did occur. The findings
provided strong evidence that the language of mildly
intellectually handicapped children is more like that
of children of the same chronological age than it is
like that of children of the same mental age and that
it is less mature than the former. These handicapped
children experience considerable delay in the
development of pronouns and verbs and have a high
incidence of non-conventional usage.
This study also provided evidence of the continuing
language development of normal primary age children.
Some methods of sampling and analysing oral language
were found to be of particular value. Of these the
sentence repetition technique seems promising both as
a research tool and as a classroom instrument for
assessing individual children's language competence.
The importance of this and similar research lies in
its implications for educational programming.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219069 |
| Date | January 1980 |
| Creators | Jones, Robin Glyn, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Robin Glyn Jones |
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