Computer-assisted analysis of written language: assessing the written language of deaf children

Methods for assessing the written language of deaf students are reviewed. The merits and shortcomings of various objective indicators that have traditionally been used are discussed. These include various measures of total output, such as total number of words or sentences, and simple measures of diversity of usage such as the type-token ratio. There have been several attempts in recent years to include objective measures of syntactic complexity as part of an overall language assessment program. The use of a computer to assist teachers in the derivation of such syntactic measures is described. Two illustrative examples are provided. The first shows how the computer system performs a detailed syntactic analysis on a typical sentence taken from the written language of a deaf child. The second example shows how the system provides a summary analysis of several sentences in a theme. A statistical count of the syntactic forms used in the written language sample is provided at the end of the analysis.