Assessing Sentences in Young Children: A Comparison of the Sentence Diversity Priming Task and Play-Based Language...

Area of Science:

• Child language development
• Speech-language pathology

Background:

• Assessing sentence development in toddlers is crucial for early identification of language disorders.
• Traditional language sampling methods can be time-consuming.
• Novel tools are needed to efficiently and validly measure sentence diversity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the validity of the Sentence Diversity Priming Task (SDPT) for assessing sentence development.
• To compare language measures obtained from the SDPT with those from play-based language samples.
• To examine differences between late-talking (LT) and typically developing (TD) toddlers using these measures.

Main Methods:

• Sixty LT and 77 TD toddlers (30-38 months) participated.
• Language samples were collected using the SDPT and a 10-minute play interaction via remote video.
• Analysis included utterance length, diversity of words and verbs, and third-person subject diversity.

Main Results:

• The SDPT yielded longer utterances and greater diversity in verbs and third-person subjects compared to play samples.
• SDPT measures differentiated LT and TD groups, showing significant interactions for mean length of utterance (MLU) and third-person subject diversity.
• Measures from both contexts were significantly associated.

Conclusions:

• The SDPT is a valid and efficient tool for assessing sentence diversity in young children.
• SDPT measures can help identify toddlers at risk for developmental language disorder.
• Further research should focus on demonstrating the discriminative utility of the SDPT.