Original Research Article
Year: 2020 | Month: February | Volume: 10 | Issue: 2 | Pages: 175-181
Profile of Syntactic and Semantic Diversity in Story Retelling and Self Narrative in Native Tamil Speaking Urban Primary School Children
Lakshmisree Ravichandran1, Usha A. Dalvi1, Arulmurugan Karuppannan2
1Department of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology, SRM Medical College Hospital and Research Centre, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur, Kancheepuram-603203, Tamil Nadu, India.
2SRM School of Public Health, SRM Medical College Hospital and Research Centre, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur, Kancheepuram-603203,Tamil Nadu, India.
Corresponding Author: Arulmurugan Karuppannan
ABSTRACT
Background: Children’s native language and culture influences the discourse production particularly narratives. Despite the available data on narrative discourse, a clear understanding of their performance during extensive discourse level is still lacking in children with multilingual exposure. The Present study was aimed to study the syntactic and semantic diversity in the story retelling and Self-Narrative skills in Tamil speaking first and Second standard urban primary school children.
Participants and methods: A total of 60 (30 boys and 30 girls) typically developing urban children having Tamil language (L1) as their mother tongue, studying in first and second standard from the school having Tamil as their medium of instruction participated. They were between the age range of 6 years to 8 years. Story Retelling ability of the child was elicited by using 10 sequenced wordless colorful pictures and for the self- Narration task the participants were asked to describe two themes separately for approximately 10 to 15 minutes. Each child‘s oral narratives were recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed by using Language Sample Analysis (LSA) which included the syntactic measure and semantic measures Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), Total No. of words (TNW), No. of Different Words (NDW) and Type Token Ratio (TTR) . The data were computed to SPSS Software, version 21 and the Statistical test used were Independent Student T test and Mann Whitney U test for this study.
Results: Results indicated that majority of the participants had clear beginning while using simple and compound narratives except very few has a difficulty in sequencing of events and resolution of problem with clear ending.
Conclusions: This study is providing a baseline data on syntactic and semantic diversity in story retelling and self - narrative task of the urban primary school children. To generalize the findings of this study further research should consider larger number of sample size from both urban and rural area separately, while controlling the socio-economic status of the children and parents. Additionally, the study can be done in bilingual children for L1 and L2 separately
Key words: Syntactic and semantic diversity, story retelling, self narrative task, Tamil speaking, urban primary school children.