THE INFLUENCE OF LANGUAGE ABILITY, AGE AND SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS ON LANGUAGE USE

Language is the process by which children succeed or fail in school. Because language is an important subject of instruction as well as the process by which that instruction is achieved, it is imperative that strategies of language use necessary for school success be identified and measured.;Language use was evaluated with the Functional Inventory of Cognitive Communication Strategies (FICCS), a structured interview which elicited four language use strategies: Reporting, Reasoning, Predicting and Projecting.;The influence of languae ability on language use was examined by comparing language-impaired children to two groups of language-normal children, one matched for age and one matched for utterance length. Performance of the language-normal group matched for age was significantly superior to that of the language-impaired group. No significant differences were observed between the language-normal group matched for utterance length and the language-impaired group. The language-impaired group achieve significantly lower overall scores than their language-normal peers but higher scores than their younger, normal counterparts matched for utterance length, suggesting that the communicative function of the impaired children was better than their linguistic skills would imply.;The influence of age and socioeconomic status on language use was evaluated using a factorial design, with two age levels (6 years and 7 years) and two social class levels (lower and higher). The language normal 6-year-olds achieved significantly higher scores than the language-normal 7-year-olds on Projecting strategies.;The purpose of this study was (1) to determine the influence of language ability, age and socioeconomic status on children's language use; and (2) to examine the relationship and predictive accuracy between measures of linguistic performance, academic achievement and language use.;Correlation analyses between performance on FICCS and measures of linguistic ability indicated a strong relationship between FICCS and nonstandardized measures of language ability but not for standardized. These findings suggest that spontaneous language sampling, through its preservation of the interactive nature of communication, provides a more powerful correlate use than acontextual standardized tools. The relationship between FICCS and measures of academic achievement was modest, indicating that language use and other factors contribute to success in the classroom.