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PELLEGRINI, A. D.; GALDA, LEE; and RUBIN, DONALD L. Context in Text: The Development of Oral and Written Language in Two Genres. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1549-1555. The intent of the study was to test Halliday's model of context/text relations and how these relations varied across the elementary school years. Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 were asked to produce messages in narrative and persuasive genres, in both the oral and written channels. Their texts were analyzed in terms of elements of linguistic cohesion and length of clausal themes. Significant multivariate effects on these measures were obtained for grade, channel, genre, channel x genre, and grade x channel. These results generally support the predicted effects for this model of discourse production: Text varied as a function of discourse context. Predicted age effects were partially supported. These results are significant in that they document age-related features of text production: organization of text with causal conjunctions improves across the elementary school years; the production of grammatically cohesive text improves through third grade. Furthermore, the data support previous research suggesting that oral text is less explicit than written text.
Pellegrini et al. (Wed,) studied this question.