Abstract

This study examines the influence of emotion understanding, language, and working memory on reticence and prosocial behavior in children with language impairment (LI). The Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL; Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) and The Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT; Bracken & McCallum, 2003) were administered to 39 children with LI and 39 typical age-matched peers. A nonword repetition task and two tasks measuring emotion understanding were also administered. Each of the participant's classroom teachers completed The Teacher Behavioral Rating Scale (TBRS; Hart & Robinson, 1996). Structural equation modeling was used to estimate models of the data using a maximum likelihood procedure for each of the groups. Results showed that for children with typical language skills, both dissemblance and language were negatively linked to reticence. For the children with LI, there was a positive relationship between dissemblance and prosocial behavior and a significant negative relationship between standard language score and prosocial behavior. When the four individual paths were tested one at a time, by constraining the estimates of each of the paths to be equal across groups, only the effect of language on prosocial behavior was significantly different between groups.

Degree

MS

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2008-12-03

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd2709

Keywords

emotion understanding, language, working memory, reticence, prosocial behavior

Language

English

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