Linguistic Disfluency in Retelling of Cause-Effect and Compare-Contrast Expository Discourses for Third to Fourth Graders from Multicultural Families

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the linguistic disfluencies of retelling in cause-effect and compare-contrast expository discourses for third to fourth graders from multicultural families. Methods Participants were 15 children from multicultural families and 15 their grade-matched children from non-multicultural families. For two groups, there were no differences on standardized receptive and expressive vocabulary tests and nonverbal intelligence test. All participants were asked to retell two expository discourses after listening to two discourses with pictures. After transcribing the speech sample, linguistic disfluencies were categorized into filled pause, silent pause, repetition, and revision. Results First, children from multicultural families produced significantly more linguistic disfluencies than those from non-multicultural families even though the total number of eojeols produced in two groups was similar. Second, children showed higher rates of disfluencies on compare-contrast, when compared to the cause-effect expository discourses. Filled pause was significantly more frequent in children from multicultural families than that from non-multicultural families and revision and pause were significantly prevalent in compare-contrast than cause-effect. Conclusion The results demonstrate that children from multicultural families produced linguistic disfluencies more frequently on the retelling of the expository discourses and it may be relevant to the difficulty on linguistic and cognitive processing of expository discourses. Linguistic disfluency would be a useful clinical index to identify the problems on process of language production at the discourse level. Key Words: Children from multicultural families, Linguistic disfluency, Expository discourse, Cause-effect, Compare-contrast 중심 단어: ë‹¤ë¬¸í™”ê°€ì •ì˜ 아동, ì–¸ì–´í•™ì  ë¹„ìœ ì°½ì„±, ì„¤ëª ë‹´í™”, 원인-ê²°ê³¼, 비교-대조