The effects of medium on the expressive vocabulary skills in the spoken narratives of low and middle socioeconomic African-American children with typical language

This study was designed to examine the effects of medium on the oral narrative skills of typically developing 4 and 5-year-old African-American children. The participants in this study were from low and middle socioeconomic backgrounds. Forty children were divided into groups by age and socioeconomic status (SES). Structurally equivalent stories in two formats: audio-only and video-only were used to elicit narrative samples. All participants received both story presentations. The narrative samples were analyzed for measures of expressive vocabulary defined by total number of words, number of different words and type token ratio (TNW, NDW and TTR, respectively). Expressive vocabulary was scored using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT Research V8).; The result of this study indicate that typically developing 4-year-old African-American children from low and middle SES produced narratives that were immature in measures of expressive vocabulary (TNW, NDW and TTR) when compared to the 5-year-old experimental group. The middle SES children in this study scored higher than the low SES on measures of TNW and NDW. However, children across both SES (low and middle), produced narratives similar in the measure TTR. When exposed to two different presentations (medium) of story stimuli, the children in the current study presented narratives that scored higher in the expressive vocabulary measures of TNW, NDW and TTR in response to the video presentation.