Production of Verbal Communicative Intentions by Maltreated Children and Normal Children in Structured Play Contexts

Lim, Ji Yoon; Kim, Sung Soo

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2007;12(2): 182-198.

Ji Yoon Lim^` , and Sung Soo Kim^`

임지윤(Ji Yoon Lim)| 김성수(Sung Soo Kim)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to compare the verbal communicative intentions of maltreated children to those of chronological age(CA)-matched normal children.
Methods
A total of 20 (10 maltreated and 10 CA-matched normal) children participated in the study. Through structured play contexts, 6,656 speech samples were collected and analyzed using seven categorical communicative intentions. A t-test was used to determine statistical significance.
Results
First, the total number of utterances of communicative intentions and the number of each categorical utterance of communicative intentions of the maltreated children were significantly lower than those of the normal children. Second, in the proportion of categorical utterances, a significant difference was found in all categories except for ‘acknowledgement’ and ‘organization device’. Of the five categories that were significantly different, only the proportion of ‘response’ of the maltreated children were significantly higher than that of the normal group. Finally, there was no difference between the two groups in terms of the order of the seven categorical intentions.
Discussion & Conclusion
From the results, it might be concluded that when interacting with a partner, maltreated children use communicative intention by the same categorically order as normal children, but maltreated children speak little and are more dependent on an inactive manner of communication than normal children do.