Date of Award

8-1-1975

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Communication Sciences & Disorders

Abstract

The. purposes of the present .study were to compare the frequency of occurrence of five simple, active, affirmative, declarative (SAAD) sentence patterns and twenty selected transformations in one-hundred utterance oral language samples of sixty preschool children (three, four, and five years of age) and twenty adults (eighteen to twenty-three years of age) and to determine if the first fifty utterances of the language samples differed from the second fifty utterances of the samples with regard to the frequency of occurrence of those same sentence patterns and transformations.

Sixty preschool children and twenty college age adults served as subjects for this study. A toy house and a toy farm were used as stimuli to obtain one-hundred utterances from the preschool subjects. Specific questions were used as stimuli to obtain the one-hundred utterance samples from the college subjects. The tape recorded samples were transcribed and classified as to the appropriate SAAD patterns or transformation.

Data were analyzed using _t tests for non-related samples. Mean numbers of occurrences of the SAAD sentences and the selected transformations presented, by the preschool subjects were significantly different from those of the adult subjects. There was not a consistent difference in the mean number of occurrence of SAAD sentences among the age groups except for pattern three. There was not a significant difference between the first and second fifty utterances of one-hundred utterance samples for SAAD sentences or for the selected transformations.

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