Measure What You Treat: Using Language Sample Analysis for Grammatical Outcome Measures in Children with...

Language Sample Analysis (LSA) is commonly used to monitor progress for children with language disorders (Pavelko, Owens, Ireland, & Hahs-Vaughn, 2016). For children with grammar goals, pediatric SLPs report mean length of utterance (MLU) and type-token ratio (TTR) as the two LSA measures most commonly used (Finestack & Satterlund, 2018). For focused grammatical intervention, these measures may be ineffective in capturing treatment growth. In this clinical focus paper, we provide a preliminary comparison of four measures that could be considered as progress monitoring tools following intervention for one finiteness marker.

Pre- and post-treatment spontaneous language samples from six children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who underwent treatment for the third person singular -s (-3s) morpheme were analyzed qualitatively. Four measures are reported: MLU, TTR, % accuracy of -3s, and Tense and Agreement Productivity (TAP) score of -3s (cf., Hadley & Short, 2005).

Increases were most common across participants in measures that examined use of the treatment target (i.e., % accuracy and TAP score of -3s). Changes in MLU were not always congruent with measures of the treatment target. Change was mostly not appreciable for TTR.

For preschool-aged children with DLD, MLU and TTR may not be effective as the sole outcome measures following treatment of -3s. Our 6 case studies highlight the benefit of measuring the treated skill as discretely as possible and with multiple measures. More research is needed into the use of LSA for outcome measures in children with language disorders.