The Relationship between the Performance of Sentence Repetition and Sentence Production in School-age Children

학령기아동의 문장따라말하기와 문장산출 능력과의 관계

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between sentence repetition and sentence production in school-age children. The participants included 120 school-age children through 1st to 6th grades who were then divided into three grade groups (lower grade: 1st to 2nd grades, intermediate grade: 3th to 4th grades, and higher grade: 5th to 6th grades). The repetition task consisted of 32 sentences that were classified by sentence length (5, 6, 7, and 8 words) and structure (conjunctive and embedded sentences). The sentence production task utilized Lee's (2007) grammaticality judgement and sentence combining task. The findings of present study were as follows. (1) The higher grade performed significantly better than the lower and intermediate grades. (2) The participants performed significantly worse when imitating longer sentences than when imitating shorter ones. In addition, there were interaction effects between grade groups and sentences length. (3) The participants performed significantly better when imitating conjunctive rather than embedded sentences. (4) There was significantly positive correlation between the sentence repetition and sentence production task.