The present longitudinal study was designed to investigate discourse characteristics of fathers with their language impaired child and their younger normal language-learning child of the same language stage (Brown 1973). Furthermore, the study includes a comparison of fathers and mothers in conversation with their language-impaired child. Developmental trends in the children's communication skills are also examined. Analysis of the parent-child conversations includes: I Structural analysis which measured MLU, total number of turns, number of utterances per turn and amount of non-verbal turns for both members of the dyad. II Functional analysis which involved an examination of conversational acts for both parents and children. III Appropriateness analysis which focused on both the parent's and child's responses to requestives. IV Initiation/Response analysis which evaluated the ability of participants to both initiate and respond. V Topic analysis which included measures of both topic initiation and maintenance for both participants. VI Communicative contingency analysis which examined the relationship between the child's communicative behaviour and the parent's response. The contingency of parental replies in terms of discourse function was also examined. It was found that variability across the fathers was pronounced. Furthermore, the results revealed the considerable diversity among not only the young language learners, but also in the highly individual communicative skills of the parent-child dyads. Clinical implications are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:570088 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Porter, E. R. |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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