The Effects of Sampling Conditions on Sentence Production in Normal, Reading-Disabled, and Language-Learning-Disabled Children

This study explored the effects of contextual support, discourse genre, and the listener's knowledge of information on syntactic and phonologic production and fluency. Subjects were language-learning-disabled, reading-disabled, and normal primary school children. Clause structure complexity, fluency, and grammatical and phonemic accuracy tended to be highest when children were discussing absent referents, providing explanations and stories, and giving unshared information. These effects were generally the same across all groups, although some effects were significant for only the language-learning-disabled children. Several explanations for these findings are considered.