A Comparison of the graphic symbol utterances arranged by children with little or no functional speech and children with typical development

Abstract

The structure of graphic symbol utterance constructed by children with typical development and also children with little or no functional speech often differs considerably from spoken utterances. Whether the structure of graphic symbol utterances constructed by these two groups is influenced by similar factors is as yet unknown, as a systematic comparison between the two groups of children has not been conducted. This study aimed to investigate and compare the graphic symbol utterances arranged by children with little or no functional speech with those arranged by their typically developing peers when they were matched according to receptive language age. The utterances were analysed in terms of three variables, namely content, order and intelligibility. The results indicated that children with little or no functional speech do not differ significantly to children with typical development on tasks of graphic symbol utterance construction. The results also indicated that children with higher receptive language age start to use the spoken language word order as a model when arranging graphic symbol utterances more than children with lower receptive language age. The findings suggest that receptive language age plays a role in graphic symbol utterance constructions. The use of structures that do not follow spoken language may be explained by effects of the visual modality.