Abstract
To verify the average time of silent pauses in narratives and the influence of story's complexity in the occurrence of these pauses in narratives of children with typical language development and children with specific language impairment (SLI), and further to compare these aspects between groups. Sixty children aged between seven to ten years took part in this research, being 40 typical language developing children and 20 with SLI. To collect data, each child produced 15 narratives, each one based on a four-scene-sequence. These narratives show increasing complexity of the relations between the characters, since absence of intentionality (mechanical and behavioral sequences) to relations between characters with mental states attribution (intentional sequences), which allowed the survey of the average time of silent pauses in the narratives produced. Story's complexity has influenced the average time of silent pauses in narratives of children with typical language development, however, for children with SLI this pattern was not observed. The comparison between groups indicates a significant difference in all types of narratives, with the highest average in the group with SLI. Due to their linguistic impairment, children with SLI had longer silent pauses in their narratives. Story complexity influenced the average time of silent pauses in the narratives of children with typical language development, but this difference did not occur in the narratives of children with SLI.
Highlights
Narrative production requires coordination between morphosyntactic and semantic abilities within a system that encompasses pragmatic aspects and cultural convention, which, in turn, influence how information is presented to the listener[1].In order to produce speech fluently, semantic, phonological, and syntactic information must be accessed in harmony with contextual information[2], and several vocal tract parts must be activated in a smooth and precise manner[3]
The occurrence of speech ruptures may be related to an imbalance between syntactic and lexical abilities during specific periods of development[5], and the appearance of more complex structures on the course of grammar acquisition, especially in relation to structures that have not been fully comprehended by the child[6]
The descriptive analysis obtained based on the average time of silent pauses in each story reveals that the lowest average occurred in the intentional stories, and the highest occurred in the mechanical 1 type (Table 1)
Summary
Narrative production requires coordination between morphosyntactic and semantic abilities within a system that encompasses pragmatic aspects and cultural convention, which, in turn, influence how information is presented to the listener[1].In order to produce speech fluently, semantic, phonological, and syntactic information must be accessed in harmony with contextual information[2], and several vocal tract parts must be activated in a smooth and precise manner[3]. The occurrence of speech ruptures may be related to an imbalance between syntactic and lexical abilities during specific periods of development[5], and the appearance of more complex structures on the course of grammar acquisition, especially in relation to structures that have not been fully comprehended by the child[6]. These structures are used as processing strategies with the purpose of gaining time or correcting mistakes during the production of sentences[4,7,8]. This child will employ less effort to access the word in his/her memory, producing less speech ruptures[5,10,11]
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