Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The aims of this project were : to build up a comprehensive picture of the development of various facets of prosodic ability in the school years, by administering a range of tests of prosodic output and comprehension, and to relate prosodic development to other aspects of linguistic development; to provide a data base against which to evaluate theories of prosodic development in the school years; to develop a prosodic assessment procedure for school-age children that can be used by speech and language therapists and other professionals; to investigate whether the relationship between prosodic output and comprehension changes with age, and if so, in what ways; to study qualitative changes in the prosodic realisation of linguistic/communicative functions, between the ages of five and 14 years.

Main Topics:

The interviews undertaken for the project consisted of an intonation assessment and two other tests as measures of receptive and expressive language respectively. The dataset shows the scores obtained by children aged between five and 14 years on : the 16 tasks comprised by the PEPS-C test (for details of the tasks see Appendix A of the documentation); the TROG (Test for the Reception of Grammar, Bishop 1987) and on; the CELF-R (CELF-R (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals - Revised, Semel, Wiig and Secord, 1987) sentence formulation task. Scores are shown first as percentages and then in raw form.

Children were selected according to the following criteria : first language English; no speech and language problems; no marked educational/behavioural problems; resident in the south east of England for three years. Equal numbers of boys and girls were recruited in each of four age-bands; average ages: 5.5, 8.6, 10.8, 13.8 years. A further 73 children (18 aged 5.6, 17 aged 8.6, 18 aged 10.8, 20 aged 13.7), otherwise meeting the same criteria, were recruited for a supplementary set of tasks.

Face-to-face interview