The ability of adults with limited expressive language to engage in open-ended interviews about personal experiences

Abstract

This study examines how adults with limited expressive language (with average sentences of five words or less) respond to open-ended questions. Participants (n = 49) completed a baseline measure and were then interviewed about a personal experience using exclusively open-ended questions, followed by open-ended and directive questions about a staged event. Their interviews were coded for mean length of utterance (MLU), number of different words and six dimensions of the Narrative Assessment Profile. Descriptively, the participants were able to give some event-related detail in their narratives, but there was wide variability in narrative quality. Correlational and regression analyses indicate that their MLU was stable across contexts. The findings suggest that adults with limited expressive language can provide informative responses to open-ended questions about their experiences, and that their expressive language is likely to show stability across introductory and substantive interview phases.

Keywords:

• practice narratives
• limited expressive language
• narrative quality
• interview
• complex communication
• open-ended questions

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the individuals who took part in this project.

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Madeleine Bearman has declared no conflicts of interest.

Marleen Westerveld has declared a perceived conflict of interest in that she has a financial relationship with SALT Software LLC (used to identify utterances in the current study); however, SALT Software LLC was not involved in the conceptualisation of the study or the analyses of the results and did not view the manuscript prior to submission.

Sonja P Brubacher has declared no conflicts of interest.

Martine Powell has declared no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants in the study.

Author note

This research was conducted as part of the PhD dissertation of Madeleine Bearman.

Notes

1 If MLU-baseline is substituted for MLU-practice in the stepwise regression, the results are the same: only MLU-baseline is a significant predictor (p < .001; all other ps ≥ .10). The model is significant, F (4, 44) = 24.99, p < .001, with an R² of .69. Holding all other variables constant, participants’ interview MLU increased by 0.92 words for each 1-word increase in their baseline MLU. Although this model is statistically stronger than the MLU-practice model, the practical difference is very small – and given that our focus is on performance for talking about a remembered event (i.e., practice narratives), we elected to present the model with MLU-practice. Broadly, however, the results suggest remarkable consistency in MLU across descriptions of three unique events.