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Purpose: The adolescent developmental task of establishing autonomy from parents is supported through various aspects of executive functioning, including critical thinking. Our aim was to investigate younger and older adolescent language performance in form, content, and use in response to a moral dilemma task. Method: Forty-four typically developing adolescents completed a language sampling task, responding to stories that contained a moral dilemma for one of the characters. Two age groups participated: younger adolescents (n = 24, 12;2-13;11 [years; months]) and older adolescents (n = 20, 16;1-17;11).Participants produced a monologue in response to an open-ended question prompt. Responses were transcribed and analyzed for discourse production on measures of form (verbal productivity and syntactic complexity) and content (semantic diversity and word percentages in three semantic domains: affective, social, and cognitive). Language use was evaluated using a coding system based on Bloom's revised taxonomy of thinking. Results: There were no significant group differences in performance on measures of syntactic complexity and semantic diversity. Significant differences were found in adolescents' language using Bloom's revised taxonomy. The younger adolescents demonstrated a significantly higher proportion of utterances at Level 1 (remembering and understanding) compared to older adolescents, while the older age group produced a higher proportion at Level 3 (evaluating and creating). Conclusions: The moral dilemma task was effective in demonstrating the growth of adolescent language skills in use of language for critical thinking. The results highlight the clinical utility of the moral dilemma task in engaging adolescents in discourse involving critical thinking, whereas the associated coding scheme, based on Bloom's revised taxonomy of thinking, may differentiate levels of critical thinking and provide direction for intervention.

Purpose: Comprehensive spoken language assessment should include the evaluation of language use in naturalistic contexts. Discourse elicitation and analysis provides the opportunity for such an evaluation to occur. In this article, our overall aim was to describe adolescents’ language performance on four elicitation tasks and determine if there are task-related differences across the elicitation tasks. Method: Forty-four typically developing adolescents with ages ranging from 12;2 to 17;11 (years;months; M = 15;2; 21 boys and 23 girls) participated in the study. They completed four spoken discourse tasks: (a) story generation using a wordless picture book, (b) fable retell, (c) six personal narratives in response to emotion-based prompts, and (d) monologic response to two stories that contained a moral dilemma. Responses were transcribed and analyzed for four language performance measures tapping into language productivity, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and verbal facility. Results: Despite individual variability in performance, mean scores were close to median scores for most measures, suggesting a symmetrical distribution. As expected, all four language performance measures were significantly different across the four elicitation tasks. The personal narrative task elicited the longest samples, with the highest verbal fluency. In contrast, both lexical diversity and syntactic complexity were the strongest in response to the fable retell and the moral dilemma tasks. Conclusions: This investigation provides speech-language pathologists with an overview of how task-related factors may impact adolescent language performance. These findings may be used to support their clinical decision-making processes in choosing a suitable discourse task when conducting a comprehensive spoken language assessment. Three hypothetical case examples are used to illustrate the decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The adolescent developmental task of establishing autonomy from parents is supported through various aspects of executive functioning, including critical thinking. Our aim was to investigate younger and older adolescent language performance in form, content, and use in response to a moral dilemma task. Method: Forty-four typically developing adolescents completed a language sampling task, responding to stories that contained a moral dilemma for one of the characters. Two age groups participated: younger adolescents (n = 24, 12;2-13;11 [years; months]) and older adolescents (n = 20, 16;1-17;11). Participants produced a monologue in response to an open-ended question prompt. Responses were transcribed and analyzed for discourse production on measures of form (verbal productivity and syntactic complexity) and content (semantic diversity and word percentages in three semantic domains: affective, social, and cognitive). Language use was evaluated using a coding system based on Bloom's revised taxonomy of thinking. Results: There were no significant group differences in performance on measures of syntactic complexity and semantic diversity. Significant differences were found in adolescents' language using Bloom's revised taxonomy. The younger adolescents demonstrated a significantly higher proportion of utterances at Level 1 (remembering and understanding) compared to older adolescents, while the older age group produced a higher proportion at Level 3 (evaluating and creating). Conclusions: The moral dilemma task was effective in demonstrating the growth of adolescent language skills in use of language for critical thinking. The results highlight the clinical utility of the moral dilemma task in engaging adolescents in discourse involving critical thinking, whereas the associated coding scheme, based on Bloom's revised taxonomy of thinking, may differentiate levels of critical thinking and provide direction for intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]