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Updated: Aug 10, 2026
Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
Estimating familial loading in SLI: a comparison of direct assessment versus parental interview
Gina Conti-Ramsden1, Zoë Simkin, Andrew Pickles
1Human Communication and Deafness, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom. gina.conti-ramsden@manchester.ac.uk
Purpose:
Two approaches commonly used for estimating prevalence of language disorders in families were compared. The 1st involved examining a subset of language items from an investigator-based interview used to record parental information on the language and literacy difficulties in relatives. The 2nd was the direct assessment of ability in immediate family using a battery of standardized verbal ability, language, and literacy assessments.
Method:
Using these 2 methods, the prevalence of language and literacy disorders was investigated in the immediate family (n=271) of 93 children with a history of SLI (mean age 13;11 years).
Results:
The overall proportion of relatives with reported language or literacy difficulty was similar for both methods (34.5% for reported difficulties compared with 35% on direct assessment). The present study further explored maternal, paternal, and sibling prevalence rates and strength of agreement between parental interview and direct assessment. When a low cutoff score was used, good agreement (of true negatives and true positives) for reading and spelling difficulties and expressive language between the 2 types of case identification method was found.
Conclusions:
Parents can be effective identifiers when the impairment is severe (below 2 SDs from the population mean). Poor agreement was observed between report and assessment of receptive language difficulties.
