An ecological assessment of oral expression development in early adolescence through automated analysis of narrative retell task

• Ano de defesa: 2022
• Autor(a) principal: Pedroni, Breno [UNIFESP]
• Orientador(a): Pompeia, Sabine [UNIFESP]
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de São Paulo
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Cognition; Development; Adolescence; Retell; Narrative; Automated language analysis
• Link de acesso: https://repositorio.unifesp.br/11600/65684

Expressive oral language development in adolescence is understudied and has usually involved a small set of language parameters. Here, we used automated language analyses of transcripts of narrative speech (fairy tale retelling elicited from two different pictures) produced by 257 native Brazilian Portuguese-speaking 9-15-year-olds (from 4th to 10th grade) in order to identify which of three developmental measures (chronological age, pubertal status and school grade) would be more sensitive to improvement in the usage of oral language skills, as well as whether there would be sex and socioeconomic status effects. We grouped multiple linguistic parameters into three language category levels (lexical, syntactic and cohesion) entered as multivariate factors in general linear models considering effects of development, sex and parental schooling. We found substantial developmental improvements in all levels, with negligible effects (in only one level) of sex and parental schooling. Age (months), academic level (school grade) and sexual maturity (pubertal status) showed comparable developmental effects, suggesting expressive language in adolescents is not better reflected by sexual maturation and school grade than age. Fairy tale retelling, with automatized scoring of linguistic features, is a sensitive, cheap, and ecological way of identifying expressive oral language development in adolescence which minimizes parental schooling interference on oral expression.