Analysis for School-Aged Children's Spoken Language: A Unit Applicable to Korean

Abstract

Objectives:The C-unit is a basic unit for school-aged children's spoken language analysis, and was developed for English speaking children.The purpose of this paper is to provide a guide for C-unit and clause segmentation applicable to Korean and to analyze school-aged children's narrative and yield the reliability. Methods: A total of 48 typically developing children in grade 1, 3, and 5 participated in this study. They were asked to generate narratives and the narratives were recorded and transcribed. The narratives were analyzed based on a new version of the segmentation guide in the number of eojeol (a Korean morphological unit) and words per C-unit, the number of adnominal clauses, adverbial clauses, nominal clauses and quoted clauses per C-unit and the number of total subordinate clauses and total clauses per C-unit. And interrater agreement was calculated. Results: With the exception of nominal clauses which were infrequently used, all the other measures increased as children moved to higher grades. And a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) compared the performance of the three grade groups. There were significant differences among the three grade groups. And interrater agreement of C-unit and clause segmentation between the first researcher and the second researcher was 93.52% and 95.0%, respectively. Conclusion: The results suggest that the elaborate guide for C-unit and clause segmentation for Korean can be a useful tool. School-aged children's syntactic maturity was observed when we applied it to their narratives. And interrater agreement of C-unit and clause segmentation was high.