The effect of topic familiarity on expository and narrative writing tasks in children with specific language impairment

This study examined how topic familiarity affects the writing tasks of children with specific language impairment as compared to children with typically developing language. All participants were in fourth and fifth grade. Writing samples were collected during two tasks involving narrative and expository discourse contexts. High and low familiarity topics were provided for both discourse contexts. Each writing sample was coded for productivity, grammatical complexity, and grammatical error measures. Results indicated that familiarity did not affect grammatical error or grammatical complexity measures. However, highly familiar topics elicited samples with longer T-units. The expository discourse context elicited a greater number of infinitives, while the narrative discourse context elicited a greater number of compound structures. Results indicated that the SLI group employed sentence pattern strategies and lack of topic maintenance.