Abstract
Single word spelling is hypothesised to restrict text generation at the beginning phases of learning to write in English and to minimise or eliminate the impact of other linguistic factors. For young writers the natural level of idea generation may be at the sentence level. Studies which examine sentence level production offer the potential to examine children’s idea generation and the cognitive and linguistic factors which impact on this. Sixty-six English speaking children aged between the ages of 7 and 11 completed oral and written sentence generation tasks and a range of standardised language and literacy measures. We reasoned that oral language sentence generation would add significant variance to performance on the written sentence generation task especially for the younger writers. Participants performed significantly better in the oral modality. Developmental differences were evident in both modalities but there was no interaction between age group and modality effect. Correlations between standardised measures revealed a complex pattern of associations between language, literacy and writing. Regression analyses were used to explore the relationships.
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Notes
- 1.
We use the term sentence generation to reflect both the written and oral products of the children. In the oral form the children are producing utterances. An utterance boundary is defined as a unit of speech bounded by silence.
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Dockrell, J.E., Connelly, V. (2016). The Relationships Between Oral and Written Sentence Generation in English Speaking Children: The Role of Language and Literacy Skills. In: Perera, J., Aparici, M., Rosado, E., Salas, N. (eds) Written and Spoken Language Development across the Lifespan. Literacy Studies, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21136-7_11
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