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Aspects of Language in Children With ADHD

Applying Functional Analyses to Explore Language Use

University of Newcastle, Australia, margaret.mathers{at}studentmail.newcastle.edu.au

This article reports some outcomes from an exploratory study that compares children diagnosed with ADHD and without language impairment with typically developing children for aspects of language use. Discourse analysis based on a systemic functional linguistics approach is applied to spoken and written samples from three different text types that are supplied by 11 children diagnosed with ADHD and 11 typically developing children. Comparisons of multiple variables most often show differences in use between the groups. Closer examination of these differences shows that relative to the controls, the ADHD group uses fewer strategies of textual organization and more avoidance, tangential, and unrelated meanings and more abandoned utterances and spelling and punctuation errors. Clinical implications suggest that careful linguistic analysis of spoken and written language of children with ADHD cannot only identify the linguistic resources they use within everyday contexts but may also indicate areas where intervention may be beneficial.

Key Words: ADHD • children’s language • functional analyses • systemic functional linguistics • language use • language impairment

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