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What do referential communication tasks measure? A study of children with specific language impairment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

D. V. M. Bishop  and
C. Adams
D. V. M. Bishop*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
C. Adams
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
*
D. V. M. Bishop, MRC Applied Psychology Unit, 15, Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, England
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Abstract

A group of 54 children with specific language impairment was compared with a control group on a referential communication task in which the child was asked to describe a picture from an array of eight similar items so that the listener could identify it. The language-impaired children performed more poorly than age-matched controls. However, there was no relationship between referential communication performance and conversational ability. Children who provided excessive and irrelevant information in conversation did not show the same characteristics in the experimental setting. Formal task requirements, such as the need to scan an array, appeared to be a major determinant of performance on structured referential communication tasks. These tasks are not sensitive to the types of pragmatic difficulty that some children have in open-ended conversation.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 199 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

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