Elicited vs. Spontaneous Language as Methods for the Assessment of Grammatical Development: The DEME Assessment Tool

Area of Science:

• Child language acquisition
• Linguistic development
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Assessing grammatical development in children is crucial for identifying language disorders.
• Different data collection methods, such as spontaneous and elicited language, may yield varying results.
• Understanding these differences is key for accurate language assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the effectiveness of spontaneous versus elicited language data collection methods in assessing grammatical development in Spanish-speaking children.
• To analyze error rates using both broad and narrow measures, specifically focusing on noun phrase errors.

Main Methods:

• The study involved 55 five-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children.
• Participants were categorized into typical language development (TL) and at-risk (Risk) groups.
• Data were collected through elicited production tasks and narrative (spontaneous) tasks.

Main Results:

• Children in the TL group consistently outperformed those in the Risk group across all measures.
• Statistically significant differences were observed between groups in both spontaneous and elicited language measures.
• Elicited language measures demonstrated a considerably higher effect size than spontaneous measures.

Conclusions:

• Elicited language sampling may offer a more sensitive measure for detecting differences in grammatical development.
• When discrepancies occur between elicited and spontaneous measures, spontaneous language may better represent a child's actual language performance.
• The choice of elicitation method did not appear to influence the types of grammatical errors produced.