Assessment of Complex Sentence Production in a Narrative Context

This study focused on eliciting and assessing complex sentence structure in a meaningful discourse context. The effect of clinician support (modeling of specific structures and practice with the structures) on the subsequent use of complex sentence structures in story retelling was studied. Experiment 1 was conducted with students demonstrating language abilities within normal limits. Because these initial results were promising, Experiment 2 was conducted with students demonstrating language impairments. The results of these experiments indicated, first, that amount of exposure to the stimulus is a critical variable affecting length and syntactic complexity in story retelling. Evidence further supported the use of modeling and practice of specific structures when assessing students' syntactic skills. The assessment protocol used in these experiments was found to be useful for eliciting a large number and variety of complex syntactic structures in a meaningful context from children with and without language impairments.