Speech-language pathologists may wish to employ expository discourse tasks rather than conversational tasks to examine syntactic development in adolescents.

The PCR task is potentially a useful tool for examining expository discourse. Research is needed to expand the database and administer the task to clinical groups.

Speech-language pathologists may wish to employ the PCR task to examine syntactic development in adolescents as a supplement to standardized testing.

In this cross-sectional investigation, syntactic development was compared in conversational versus expository discourse in 120 typically developing children, adolescents, and adults, age 7 to 49 years. Each participant was asked to discuss common topics such as school, family, and friends to elicit conversational discourse and to explain the rules and strategies of a favorite game or sport to elicit expository discourse. The results showed greater syntactic complexity in expository discourse than in conversational for all age groups, supporting the view that complex thought is driving the development of complex language. For both genres, growth in syntax continued throughout childhood and adolescence and into early adulthood (age 20-29 years) and remained stable into middle age (age 40-49 years). The 2 best indicators of growth were mean length of T-unit and relative clause production, both of which showed age-related increases into early adulthood. Another variable that was sensitive to growth was the total number of T-units produced, a measure of language output. In general, older speakers talked more than younger ones regardless of genre. Despite the statistically significant group effects, there were wide individual differences. For example, in the expository genre, some of the younger children used rather elaborate syntax whereas some of the older adults spoke quite simply. Thus, it appears that individual variability can exist at all points along the age continuum, despite the trend toward greater syntactic complexity as a function of increasing chronological age.

The development of mental imagery in relation to the comprehension of concrete proverbs (e.g., one rotten apple spoils the barrel) was examined in children, adolescents, and adults who were ages 11 to 29 years old (n = 210). The findings indicated that age-related changes occurred in mental imagery and in proverb comprehension during the years between late childhood and early adulthood, and that the two domains were associated in children and adults but not in adolescents. Children and adults were more likely to describe relevant mental imagery (age 11: "A big barrel of apples and a woman picks up one that is rotten and there are worms in it and the worms go to all the other apples") when they also comprehended the proverb on a multiple-choice task. It was also found that participants' mental images became more metaphorical in relation to increasing age (age 21: "One bad comment can spoil the entire conversation"). The findings are consistent with dual coding theory, the view that nonverbal information (relevant visual imagery) in addition to verbal information (related words and phrases) supports language comprehension in the case of concrete meanings. The results also support the view that mental imagery reflects figurative understanding and the individual's tacit awareness of underlying metaphorical concepts.Proverbs are figurative expressions such as silence is golden, haste makes waste, and early to bed, early to rise that convey the beliefs, social norms, or moral concerns of a society