Background: The Language Development Survey (LDS) and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) are two parental report forms that have been productive in providing data on early child language during the past 30 years. The instruments have been used both in studies relating to typical developing children and in screening…

Children with language disorders have particular difficulty with verbs, but when this difficulty emerges is unknown. We examined syntactic (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive) and semantic (manner, result) features of two-year-olds' verb vocabularies, contrasting late talkers and typically developing children to look for early differences in…

Purpose: This follow-up study assessed (a) the influence of phonological working memory (pWM), home literacy environment, and a family history of linguistic impairments in late talkers (LTs); (b) the diagnostic accuracy of a task of nonword repetition (NWR) in identifying LTs; and (c) the persistence of lexical weaknesses after 10 months. Method:…

This study evaluated application of a revised criterion for the Language Development Survey, a parent-report screening measure designed to identify young children with language delays. The revised criterion generated fewer false positives, improved specificity, and improved positive predictive value while maintaining the high sensitivity and high…

Two studies are reported demonstrating the reliability, validity, and clinical utility of the Language Development Survey (LDS) as a screening tool for the identification of expressive language delay in toddlers. The LDS test-retest reliability was .97. The LDS also correlated highly with other measures and the LDS identified at-risk group scored…