Emotionally handicapped students are described as having difficulty forming peer relationships and achieving academically. Because language is critical to these areas, this research project described and compared the expressive language characteristics of nonhandicapped and emotionally handicapped 8- and 9-year-olds, as defined by the mean length of utterance and 13 discourse error categories. This study included 44 subjects, a group of 22 nonhandicapped and a group of 22 emotionally handicapped students. Following informal conversations, language samples (180 communication units for each subject) were transcribed, segmented into communication units, coded, and scored to determine the quality and quantity of discourse errors students made. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used as the primary statistical test of the data to compare group means on all the dependent variables simultaneously. Results indicate that there was a significant difference between the groups based on the expressive language characteristics considered in this study. The major findings are discussed and implications for education and for future research are also presented.
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