Early identification of language delay is important as it has a serious impact on a child's life in terms of educational, social, and emotional development. Among the early language screening tools, there are some parent-administered tools; however, they are not culturally appropriate or freely available. This article documents the development and…

Purpose: Language sampling analysis (LSA) plays an important role in evaluating language skills; hence, the study aimed to develop new assessment measures for the LSA in Turkish as alternatives to mean length of utterance (MLU) and the Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure. With this aim, Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) and…

Borrowing from a clinical psychology observational methodology, thin-slice observations were used to assess autism characteristics in toddlers. Thin-slices are short observations taken from a longer behavior stream which are assigned ratings by multiple raters using a 5-point scale. The raters' observations are averaged together to assign a…

With the increasing number of preschool-age children of Latino heritage entering U.S. schools comes a growing need to accurately determine children's individual needs and identify potential disabilities, beginning with the screening process. Unfortunately, teachers face many challenges when screening English language learners. Often, parents have…

Several research groups have previously constructed short forms of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) for different languages. We consider the specific aim of constructing such a short form to be used for language screening in a specific age group. We present a novel strategy for the construction, which is applicable…

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…

Describes the rationale and development of a new screening test, Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning-3 (DIAL-3), which is based on previous editions. Empirical research is presented to document item additions and deletions as well as the continued maintenance of three performance areas: motor, concepts, and language. (Author/CR)

The English language portions of appropriate levels of the Language Assessment Scales (LAS) were administered to 193 English-speaking monolingual elementary school students. The students were aged 5-14, and had average reading achievement scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. On the basis of the publisher's norms, maturational trends in scores…

This study examined test characteristics of the Pediatric Language Acquisition Screening Tool for Early Referral-Revised (PLASTER-R), a set of developmental questionnaires for children 3 to 60 months of age. The PLASTER-R was moderately to highly successful in identifying children within normal limits for language development. Test-retest…

Stability of the Early Screening Profiles (ESP), developed by P. Harrison, was examined with a sample of 23 non-handicapped preschool children (14 females and 9 males) ranging in age from 3 years 0 months to 6 years 0 months at the time of initial testing. The sample was drawn from a rural/suburban community in the midwest with a predominantly…

Purpose: To scale language milestones in a group of 527 children to provide an instrument for screening language development. Procedure: The questionnaire regarding these milestones was completed by parental report. It was evaluated whether the scaled milestones satisfied the assumptions of the Mokken item response model. Results: The scalability…

Kindergarten children (n=101) were tested on the Bankson Language Test Second Edition and the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Revised Screening Test and were given the tests again 7 months later. Results showed that the children scored higher on both tests at the second administration, without intervention from a speech-language…

The Board of Education of the Houston Independent School District, through the Volunteers in Public Schools, organized the Kindergarten Screening Project in 1970. The Kindergarten Screening Instrument (KSI) consists of five sub-scales: (1) the visual scale measures visual acuity at 20 feet; (2) the hearing scale measures the child's ability to…