Semantic Analyzability of the Intra - and Inter - sentences of the Language - Disordered Children at 2- to 3- year of Language Age

Kim, Young Tae

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 1999;4(1): 1-18.

Young Tae Kim^`

김영태(Young Tae Kim)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate the semantic analyzability of the intra- and inter - sentences of the language- disordered children. Thirty- five language- disordered children and 35 MLUmatched 2- to 3- year - old normal children served as the participants. Participants ' spontaneous utterances were collected and analyzed semantically. The findings were as follows : (1) the number of grammatical units and the semantic units are significantly correlated in both groups , (2) most frequently used semantic roles and relations were common in the two groups. Only five of the semantic roles were statistically different between the two groups. Although most of the semantic roles and relations occurred more frequently in the language- disordered group, the possessor and communicative devices occurred more frequently in the normal group, (3) among the Intersentence relations, the language- disordered group used significantly more juxtaposition and conjoining, while there was no difference in the use of embedding. However, adjective embedding was used more frequently in the normal group, while substantive embedding was used more frequently in the language- disordered group. This study suggested a need for a more systematic semantic analysis of early simple and complex sentences of the language- disordered children.