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transcript. All coding was compared and consensus was reached through discussion.
To view the narrative with target content, see Appendix B.
To be conservative, we used the unpaired, exact Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney
(WMW) test for group comparisons. The WMW test was chosen because it
does not assume a normal distribution, and the exact versions were used to
account for the small sample sizes. We did not use a Bonferroni test since this
procedure is overly conservative (see Perneger, 1998).
Results
Table 2 shows that there were no significant differences between the group of
children with HL and the group with TD, other than that the children with HL
showed a lower relevance ratio than their same age-peers with TD (HL mean:
0.61, SD 0.25; TD mean: 0.79, SD 0.24; Z = -2.531, p = .01). This means that they
provided less crucial content information per C-unit than their peers with TD.
The variability (SD) in both groups was relatively high in terms of grammatical
accuracy (percent correct C-units) and percent XVS clauses. Although not
at a level of statistical significance, the group with TD produced slightly more
story-grammar units, more XVS clauses, more grammatically correct C-units,
and fewer unmarked verbs (e.g., / hon sitta/ for /hon sitt er / - /she sit/ for
/she sits/ or /she is sitting/) than the group with HL.
Discussion
The results show that as a group, the children with HL performed at the
same level as children with TD on all of our measures except one. Our review
of the literature suggested that children with mild-to-moderate HL may show
less developed higher order language skills than children with TD. This prediction
was not confirmed, however, although a lack of significance does not
necessarily mean no difference in small populations. In addition to analyzing
results at the group level, we conducted a post-hoc analysis of potential outliers
in the data. We did not find any such outliers, and the variation within the
Table 2. Group comparisons: HL and TD
Variable
P-value comparing the
2 groups
Mean
HL
SD
HL
Mean
TD
Story Gram .171 5.89 2.05 6.7 1.8
Relevance Ratio .01 0.61 0.25 0.79 0.14
% Corr C-units .498 96.94 7.72 95.91 7.33
% Unmarked Verbs .577 4.11 5.58 3.35 5.58
% XVS Clauses .98 51.94 27.98 57.2 25.06
Connect/ C-Unit 0.258 0.75 0.24 0.82 0.19
Diff Verbs/ C-Unit .14 0.95 0.43 1.04 0.17
SD
TD
398 Reuterskiöld, Ibertsson, & Sahlén