Title Development of cohesive measures in Cantonese preschoolers' narratives

Aim: This study aimed to examine the clinical usefulness of four cohesive measures in describing Cantonese-speaking preschool children’s narrative ability. Method: A total of 90 typically-developing Cantonese–speaking children aged from 3;00 to 6;00 were recruited. Fictional narratives were elicited through story retelling. The measures under investigation included (1) mean length of utterance (MLU), (2) connectives, (3) modifiers and (4) referencing. Results: All the four measures demonstrated satisfactory to good scoring reliability with MLU showing the lowest agreement. Each measure demonstrated statistically significant growth across age groups but with different rate of development. The measure of referencing was found to be the most developmentally sensitive and followed by modifiers. Conclusions: The feasibilities of using each measure to describe preschool children’s language in clinical practice were discussed. This study may pave the way to the development of a largerscale standardized assessment tools in the future. Development of Cohesive Measures 3 Narrative is essential to preschool children’s daily communication as it occurs frequently in the daily conversation of typically developing (TD) children in nurseries (Preece, 1987). For example, children may need to narrate a story or share experiences with peers. At the same time, narratives are remarkably relevant to speech language pathologists (SLPs). Narratives demonstrated clear developmental changes in preschool children’s course of development, particularly in terms of structural elements, temporal conjunctions (McGregor, 2000) and sentence complexity (Shapiro & Hudson, 1991). Narratives also demonstrated good sensitivity in identifying language disordered (LD) children (Liles, 1993) and preschool children with reading problems (McGregor, 2000). Despite the various clinical values in the preschool population, no standardized narrative assessment for Cantonese preschool children is available in Hong Kong. SLPs might need to employ general and translated narrative assessment tools like the Bus Story (Renfrew, 1991) as well as the relevant literatures and narrative assessment procedures like the Frog Story (Strong, 1998) as a reference in their clinical practice. However, patterns of narrative acquisition differed across languages and cultures (McGregor, 2000; Hickmann, & Hendriks, 1999). Assessing the narrative performance of Cantonese children with reference to normative data collected from children speaking other languages is not reliable and valid and very limited information can be obtained. Therefore, a set of standardized procedures and norms for assessing Cantonese-speaking preschool children’s narratives was urgently needed. Children’s narrative ability can be analyzed in terms of coherence and cohesion (Liles, Duffy, Merritt, & Purcell, 1995). Coherence describes the structural components of the story, which are organized by temporal and causal relationships (Liles, et al., 1995). Although different researchers might employ different definitions and labels of the structural components, such as setting, attempt and outcome, they are similar in nature (Schneider, Hayward, & Dube, 2006). In clinical practice, coherence analysis examines children’s ability to include story grammar Development of Cohesive Measures 4 components and construct complex episode structure. For cohesion, it describes narratives at a more linguistic level rather than a conceptual one as coherence. It describes the use of cohesive devices, which are used to conjoin semantic relationships within and across sentences of a story (Liles, 1985). Practically, cohesion analysis examines children’s ability in using cohesion reference, substitution ellipsis, connectives, and lexical cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). For example, in “Tom is a sportsman. He loves playing golf”, the pronoun “he” demonstrates acrosssentence co reference as he represents Tom, which just has been mentioned in the previous sentence. According to Liles et al. (1995), cohesion and coherence analysis indicated two underlying areas of children’s narrative ability. Liles et al. (1995) conducted a regression analysis and re-examined the sensitivity of various coherent and cohesive measures in three published studies. Results showed that cohesive measures were more sensitive in identifying LD children. It was the higher sensitivity of cohesion analysis in identifying LD children that supported the focus of the current study to examining preschool children’s narrative in terms of cohesion. Various Cohesive Measures In the literatures, many qualitative and quantitative cohesive measures were found to demonstrate significant growth in English-speaking children’s narratives. As cited in Liles (1993), developmental changes in the use of temporal conjunctions (e.g., as, when, while) and the use of nominals and pronominals for referential use were observed in children in Silva’s and BannettKastor’s studies respectively. More recently, Justice, Kaderavek, Ukrainetz, Eisenberg, and Gillam (2006) reported a general increase in a number of microstructure indices such as mean length of T-units in morphemes and total number of different words across children from 5;00 to 10;00. Narrative development in Cantonese-speaking children was also studied in a similar fashion but to a lesser extent. A number of smaller-scale studies have been carried out on the narrative Development of Cohesive Measures 5 production by Cantonese-speaking preschool children. They provided more specific information on the usefulness of various cohesive devices in describing the developmental pattern in the language and served as the ground work for the present study. Many of the studies investigated one aspect of the narrative development. Only several of them considered more than one dimensions in the same study on the same cohort of children. For example, Wong (1993) examined 24 language measures in her analysis of 4and 7-year-old Cantonese-speaking preschool children’s narratives. She adopted a translated version of “Ann and Ben” story for elicitation of children’s production. Among these 24 measures, 12 of them were found to significantly differentiate the two groups. All these 12 measures were syntactic in nature and they were mainly related to utterance length, noun phrase and verb phrase elaboration, use of connectives and use of some specific morphemes such as classifiers and aspect markers. Two more recent studies examined school-age narrative development in Cantonese-speaking children and some of the measures were also reported in Wong’s (1993) study. Wong, Au and Stokes (2004) explored three composite measures, namely mean length of communications units (MLCU), structure scores and word scores, on Cantonese children from 5;00 to 9;00. Subsequently, To, Stokes, Cheung and T’sou (accepted) examined four measures including referencing, connectives, syntactic complexity, and semantic scores. The measures were applied to a large group of school-age children in these two studies and demonstrated the clinical usefulness in differentiating TD and LD children. Both of the studies concluded that complexity was a developmentally sensitive measure for school-age children. All these studies proved the feasibility of using a large variety of cohesive measures in describing the developmental changes in Cantonese-speaking preschool children’s narratives. But for practical reasons it is not possible to incorporate all the above good measures in developing a narrative test for the preschool children. Therefore, four most potential measures were selected in Development of Cohesive Measures 6 this study. These measures were shown to be able to significantly and reliably differentiate Cantonese-speaking preschool children at different ages. They included (1) mean length of utterance (MLU), (2) connectives and (3) modifiers and (4) referencing. Rationales for the choice of each measure in the present study were discussed in more details as follows: Mean Utterance Length Mean length of utterance (MLU) in conversation was first discussed by Brown (1973), who suggested that it could reflect English children’s linguistic growth during early years. This measure was also used to examine children’s grammatical complexity in conversation and narratives by many researchers (e.g., Gummersall & Strong, 1999; Peterson, Jesso, & McCabe, 1999) including Cantonese (e.g., Klee, Stokes, Wong, Fletcher, & Gavin, 2004). The rate of development of the predicted MLU values in Cantonese was slower than that in English children after the 36 months (Klee, et al., 2004). This may be because of the pro-drop properties in Cantonese in which speakers often drop the sentence-initial subject and object of the sentence which was not present in English (Yip & Matthews, 2006). Although Cantonese children showed less vigorous development than the English-speaking counterparts in this measure, the developmental sensitivity of MLU in Cantonese-speaking preschool children has also been supported by some other studies. Wong (1993) also reported significant growth of the mean syntactic unit between the 4and 7-year-old groups. Moreover, the measure of MLU was also found to be correlated with age in 27-to-68-month-old children in Klee and his colleagues’ study in 2004. Therefore, mean utterance length was still considered as a potential measure to demonstrate the developmental trend in preschool children. Connectives Connectives were defined as cohesive markers which conjoin independent clauses or sentences semantically. They were categorized into additive (e.g., 同 tung and”), adversative Development of Cohesive Measures 7 (e.g., 但係 daan hai “but”), temporal (e.g., 跟住 gan zyu “then”) and causal connectives (e.g., 因為 jan wai “because”) at a semantic level (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Silva (1991) reported developmental progression for the use of connectives (including as, when and while) in American