Language Sampling for Preschoolers With Severe Speech Impairments

Area of Science:

• Speech-Language Pathology
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Children with severe speech impairments often present challenges in language assessment.
• Accurate measurement of expressive language and comprehensibility is crucial for intervention planning.
• Standardized tests may not fully capture the expressive abilities of children with significant speech difficulties.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine the reliability of language sample measures, such as mean length of utterance (MLU) and percentage of comprehensible words, in children with severe speech impairments.
• To investigate the correlation between these language sample measures and established tools assessing related speech, language, and cognitive constructs.

Main Methods:

• 15 preschoolers with severe speech impairments and normal receptive language were included.
• Language samples were transcribed independently by two transcribers.
• Nonparametric statistics were employed to assess reliability and correlations between measures.

Main Results:

• Mean length of utterance (MLU) in words, mean syllables per utterance, and percentage of comprehensible words were reliably extracted from language samples.
• Language sample comprehensibility correlated with a single word comprehensibility task.
• Language sample MLUs correlated with MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory sentence length measures.

Conclusions:

• Language sampling, with modifications, can yield reliable expressive language and comprehensibility data for 3-to 5-year-olds with severe speech impairments and normal receptive language.
• This approach offers a viable alternative or supplement to standardized testing for this population.
• Findings support the use of language sampling for assessing specific linguistic features in children with complex communication needs.