A Study on the Performance Rules of Speech Acts in Children with Mental Retardation

Jeon, Byung-Un; Cho, Yu-Jin

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2001;6(1): 1-23.

Byung-Un Jeon^` , and Yu-Jin Cho^`

전병운(Jeon, Byung-Un)| 조유진(Cho, Yu-Jin)

ABSTRACT

The purpos e of the pr es ent s tudy was to inves tigate the degr ees of obs ervance of the per formance rules of speech acts on the bas is of the 8 speech - acts that Sear le showed and to inves tigate the differ ences in the per formance rules of speech acts and mean length of utter ance to find out the pr oblem ar eas of communication in childr en with mental r etar dation . For ty childr en with mental r etar dation wer e tes ted in light of the degr ees of the per formance of speech acts compos ed of 37 inventor ies , s ocial matur ity s cales , and MLU. They wer e divided into two groups , the high - level gr oup and the low- level gr oup . The r es ults of the s tudy could be s ummar ized as follows : (1) Among the cons titutive rules of speech acts , ins is tence and information demand showed the highes t r ates of obs ervance and rule or der , the lowes trate , (2) Among the 8 speech acts s tudied the two gr oups showed differ ences in s even of the speech acts , ins is tence being an excepption , (3) A meaningful differ ence is found in MLU between the two gr oups . The obs ervance of the cons titutive rules incr eas ed in par allel with the incr eas e in MLU, (4) Accor ding to the total r es ults of corr elation among the obs ervances of cons titutive rules of speech acts , Social Quotient (SQ) and MLU ar e found to be meaningfully corr elated. But MLU has a high corr elation as .67(p