Oral Language Skills of Female Juvenile Delinquents

The language performances of female delinquents and nondelinquents were compared on composite scores from a standardized test (the Test of Language Competence-Expanded) and an informal language sample analysis procedure (a modified version of the Clinical Discourse Analysis). Participants included 28 Caucasian, institutionalized, adolescent, female delinquents with no previous identification of learning or language difficulties and 28 nondelinquent females of similar age. Delinquent participants scored significantly lower than nondelinquents on the standardized measure and on the percentage of utterances in the language samples that had syntactic and morphological errors. However, significant group differences did not emerge on pragmatically based aspects of the language sample analysis. Based on results of the standardized testing, 4 (14.29%) delinquent participants and no nondelinquent participants were potential candidates for language intervention services.