Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare child language assessment practices of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in school and non-school settings to determine if their place of employment impacts the diagnostic decision-making process. Method: School-based SLPs (e.g., direct service providers employed in preschool and/or K-12…

Purpose: This study reports on data from a survey of speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) language assessment practices for elementary school-age children. The objective was to investigate the regularity with which SLPs use different types of assessments (described across data types, task types, environmental contexts, and dynamic features). This…

Purpose: Multilingual children are disproportionately represented on speech pathology caseloads, in part due to the limited ability of traditional language assessments to accurately capture multilingual children's language abilities. This systematic review evaluates the evidence for identification of language disorder in multilingual children…

Purpose: The purpose of this feasibility study was to investigate an early dynamic measure of morphological awareness (MA) involving graduated prompts to measure early MA skill and determine whether this task relates to and predicts performance on other language and/or literacy measures in first-grade children with language abilities typically…

Purpose: Our proof-of-concept study tested the feasibility of virtual testing using child assessments that were originally validated for in-person testing only. Method: Ten adult-child dyads were assigned to complete both in-person and virtual tests of language, cognition, and narratives. Child participants fell between the ages of 4 and 8 years;…

Purpose: Both narrative language samples and norm-referenced language tests can be important components of language assessment for school-age children. The present study explored the relationship between these 2 tools within a group of children referred for language assessment. Method: The study is a retrospective analysis of clinical records from…

Purpose: This study compared the development of essential elements of narrative skill in children from African American English (AAE)- and general American English (GAE)-speaking communities using an innovative elicitation and evaluation protocol consisting of four key indices of narrative language: (a) reference contrasting, (b) temporal…

Language samples were elicited from 18 kindergarten and 18 second-grade students, using three variations of an imperative sentence language sampling procedure. (Author/CL)

The study involving 18 four year old children was designed to determine whether or not similar processes would be identified when responses obtained through a delayed word imitation task were compared to those obtained through a delayed sentence imitation task. (SB)

Language samples were obtained from 12 Head Start preschool children under the following three experimental conditions: Condition I, Retelling a Story with Toys; Condition II, Playing with Toys; Condition III, Toys with Questions. Results indicated that retelling a story produced the largest mean length of utterance, but toys and questions…

The article suggests that comparability, representativeness, and typicality must be considered along with length when collecting language samples. A framework is offered for selecting or devising tasks, and one successful battery is described which has been field tested on language-disordered children with syntax problems. (CL)

A study with 10 developmentally delayed children between the ages of 52 and 80 months found that test-retest samples resulted in greater variability for lexical and morphological measurements than split-half transcripts. It was also found that 50-utterance sample segments contained 70-80 percent of the lexical information found in 100-utterance…

Discussed are the construction and scoring of elicited imitation tasks, a sentence repetition procedure which can be used to obtain information about a child's syntactic abilities. (LS)

The Feasibility Scale for Language Acquisition Routing, a technique for helping audiologists and other clinicians design language stimulation programs for young hearing impaired students, is described. (CL)

Purpose: Pragmatic language disorders (PLDs) are difficult to diagnose in a cost-effective manner, and there are few assessment tools that yield quantitative data. This investigation was designed to determine whether two formal assessment tools would differentiate PLDs in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) from controls matched on…