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Investigating the direct and indirect reported speech use of young adults with developmental language disorder
Perelmutter, Bogi
Perelmutter, Bogi
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Abstract
This dissertation examines reported speech production among undergraduate college students with a history of developmental language disability (DLD) compared to controls with a history of typical language development (TD). 59 people participated across two separate studies. Study 1 involved a reanalysis of previously recorded in-person dyadic interview data to assess reported speech (RS), and compare direct and indirect RS production in spontaneous speech, alongside syntactic and lexical complexity, and hesitation phenomena such as uh, um and pauses. Study 2 was conducted online and in addition to an adapted online DLD screener, involved a task to produce various forms of complex syntax alongside RS (the adult version of the Peer Conflict Task which I developed based on the preexistent child version created by Nippold et al. (2009)), and a task that specifically elicited RS constructions from participants with three conditions: neutral, direct RS bias, and indirect RS bias. Similarly to Study 1, syntactic and lexical complexity, and hesitation phenomena were also evaluated.I analyzed participants’ language production both using quantitative comparisons, and a qualitative approach using a performance studies framework, specifically Bauman (2004)’s investigation of performance limitations. Participants in the DLD group showed patterns of RS production that were not only distinct from controls’, but also distinct from their general performance in the domain of complex syntax. I discuss how the three tasks of spontaneous speech, peer conflictdescriptions and sentence elicitations form a continuum of increased abstraction / control and decreased ecological validity, and how these factors affect participants’ strategies in handling task demands – as present in both qualitative and quantative analyses of the same dataset.Participants in the DLD group optimized their utterances in multiple ways during the performance of relatively restrictive tasks: on the structural, sentence level, adjusting other elements of the utterance to make the production of RS easier; on a more utterance-level pragmatic way by iiiusing specific constructions to get around the need to produce RS; and on a general discourse level by using disclaimers of performance.
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2022-08-31
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University of Kansas
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912072_1.pdf
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Keywords
Behavioral sciences, Language, Higher education, College students, Developmental Language Disorder, Language development, Language disabilities, Reported speech, Speech production