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KMID : 0921420090140030349
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Korean Journal of Communication Disorders
2009 Volume.14 No. 3 p.349 ~ p.362
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The Developmental Changes in Mazes in the Retelling of Two Types of Discourse by Elementary School Children: A Comparison between Narratives and Expository Discourses
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Lim Jong-Ah
Hwang Min-A
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Abstract
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Background & Objectives: In the present study, we investigated the developmental changes in mazes obtained in two types of story retelling: narrative and expository stories. Mazes were considered to represent linguistic disfluencies.
Methods: Forty-nine elementary school children in grades 1, 3 and 5 participated in this study. After reading several accounts, the participants were asked to retell both a narrative and an expository discourse. The transcripts of the children’s stories were analyzed using various measures, including the total number of unmazed words, frequencies of mazes and the number of mazes in different types. The ratio of mazes in the discourses and the relative ratios of the maze types were calculated. The types of mazes included fillers, repetitions, repairs, silent pauses, and others.
Results: The ratio of mazes in the discourses decreased as the grades of the participants increased. The children produced significantly more mazes while retelling expository stories than when retelling narratives. The ratio of repairs in all mazes increased as the age of the participants increased. The relative frequencies of repairs were considered to reflect the children’s abilities to monitor and change errors in their speech.
Discussion & Conclusion: The developmental changes in maze production indicated that mazes may reflect the proficiency of children’s speech production skills. Specifically, repairs appear to reflect children’s abilities to monitor the errors in their speech production. Children produced more mazes in expository stories than in narrative stories because the expository stories may require a greater processing load in comprehending, remembering and reconstructing the content to retell. Such a load may negatively influence the planning and execution of speech production.
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KEYWORD
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mazes, linguistic disfluency, repairs, retelling, narrative, expository discourse, elementary school children
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