Assessment of language structure: from syntax to event-based analysis

The last 70 years have seen much research and clinical attention devoted to the descriptions and assessment of children's developing language structures. From these efforts have evolved a number of ways to describe the kinds of structures children evidence at different stages of development, and thus the means to make comparisons across children or across time periods. This article reviews major trends that have emerged in syntactic descriptions and approaches to language habilitation, culminating in contemporary approaches that view syntactic structure in real life events rather than in artificial tasks or with arbitrary checklists. These new approaches allow us to determine the communication goals that are not being met rather than cataloging the syntactic structures that have not yet been mastered and provide us with the contexts for helping the children develop structures that will lead to clearer expression of meanings and fewer breakdowns in communication.