Investigating the discourse abilities of typically developing adolescents

Background: A comprehensive assessment of language ability addresses an individual’s language skills in form, content, and use. The analysis of language performance in discourse production provides information from a functional perspective, that is not examined in standardised, norm-referenced assessment tools. Language sample analysis offers the speech pathologist an ecologically valid tool for identifying strengths and weaknesses in an individual’s text-level language. In making clinical decisions regarding the most relevant and appropriate discourses to evaluate, the speech pathologist needs to consider two factors: (a) the type of elicitation task and (b)the measures used to assess language performance. Discourse production hasbeen studied extensively in relation to the school-aged child but has primarily been viewed through an educational lens. This needs to be extended to describe and evaluate the discourse production of adolescents in genres other than those with an education bias. Specifically, are there discourses that could provide relevant and meaningful information regarding adolescent language, for the speech pathologist in a mental health context? The overall aim of this research is to consider the effectiveness of four elicitation tasks in eliciting spontaneous language samples from typically developing adolescents in order to evaluate language use at word, sentence, and text level for the mental health context. Method: Forty-five, typically developing adolescents (25 younger adolescents: 12-13 years and 20 older adolescents: 16-17 years) participated in an assessment protocol consisting of four discourse elicitation tasks. These included: story generation to a wordless picture book, fable retell, telling personal narratives, and a monologic response to stories that contained a moral dilemma. First, discourse production was examined at (a) word level (lexical diversity, lexical complexity, three semantic domains –affective, social, and cognitive, and
Thesis (Masters)
Master of Philosophy (MPhil)
School of Health Sci & Soc Wrk
Griffith Health
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