Abstract
The chapter discusses the use of sentence generation tasks in the assessment of written expression skills in young Italian writers. Three tasks were developed for assessing the fluency with which children retrieve and employ morpho-syntactic structures in writing: an oral sentence generation task, a written sentence generation task, and a sentence reformulation task. In two studies, the sensitivity of these tasks to developmental and individual differences in writing was compared with that of other standardized language measures (word and nonword spelling, rapid automatic naming, and picture naming) used to assess writing. The results of the two studies were consistent in showing that oral and written sentence generation measures are the most sensitive to developmental and individual differences in writing. Results are discussed in light of their instructional and clinical implications.
This research was funded by the MIUR- PRIN 2006 Grant No 111929.
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Notes
- 1.
Italian is a null-subject language with a rich inflectional morphology. Children must generate agreement between nouns and articles by inflecting these forms in gender and number, and must inflect verbs for mode, tense and person to express time and generate agreement between verbs and subjects. Thus, translating ideas in well-structured sentences may be particularly demanding for young Italian writers.
- 2.
In the Italian educational system grade six corresponds to the first year of secondary school.
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Arfé, B., Pizzocaro, E. (2016). Sentence Generation in Children with and Without Problems of Written Expression. In: Perera, J., Aparici, M., Rosado, E., Salas, N. (eds) Written and Spoken Language Development across the Lifespan. Literacy Studies, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21136-7_19
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