Taiwanese Elderly Adults' Narrative Ability in Southern Min - A Study on Mean Length of Utterances

• Main Authors: Lin-Ju Kuo, 郭玲汝
• Other Authors: James H-Y. Tai
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/96309308395970532174

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 語言學研究所 === 102 === This study aims to make use of the mean length of utterances (MLU) to examine the ability of narrative of Taiwanese elderly adults. According to previous studies, firstly, older elderly adults’ MLU of narrative was shorter than younger, and which showed the tendency of different MLU produced by different age groups (Kynette & Kemper, 1986). Secondly, it showed the tendency that elderly adults with higher educational level produced longer MLU (Cheung & Kemper, 1992). And thirdly, the genre of narrative could affect significantly different MLU by elderly adults (Kemper, Kynette, Rash, O’Brien & Sprott, 1989). Thus, three major issues about this study are listed as the following. (1) Would age significantly affect elderly adults’ MLU? (2) Would educational level affect elderly adults’ MLU? (3) Would genre of narrative affect elderly adults’ MLU? The way of calculating MLU in Mandarin is based on words and syllables (Cheung, 1998). And the method of this study in Taiwanese Southern Min is to utilize MLU both by words (MLUw) and by syllables (MLUs) (Cheung, 1998), to examine the ability of 20 elderly adults, aged 65-85, from Minxiong Township in Chiayi County, in narrating their own experiences or stories and describing a story from wordless pictures in Taiwanese Southern Min. Besides the genre of narrative, the factors of age and education were manipulated, and the wordless picture book “Frog, where are you?” (Mayer, 1969) was used in the picture description. All the data were transcribed using the Adult-Corpus Romanization Input Program (Ruan, Hsu, Myers, & Tsay, 2012) of National Chung Cheng University, and IBM SPSS statistics V.21 was used to statistically analyze all the data, which amounted to 1,000 complete utterances from the narrative and 1,671 complete utterances from the picture description. The results showed (1) that age significantly affected MLUs in the narrative, and the older participants produced a significantly higher MLUs than the younger participants in the narrative; (2) that education level significantly affected MLUw and MLUs in the picture description, and the participants who had received six years of formal school education produced a significantly higher MLUs than the participants who were illiterate; and (3) that there was a significant difference between the MLUs of the narrative and the MLUs of the picture description, and the participants produced a significantly higher MLUs in the narrative than in the picture description. According to the results above, it can be inferred that elderly adults’ language performance may not undergo age-related decline. In some respects, the older participants’ language performance was even better than that of the younger participants. In addition, education level is perhaps a more significant factor in spontaneous picture descriptions than in narratives. The educated participants’ language performance in the picture description was better than that of the illiterate participant’s. However, education level may not predict a participant’s mean length of utterances in narratives.