Testing for a specific syntactic structure.

Area of Science:

• Child language acquisition
• Developmental linguistics
• Clinical linguistics

Background:

• Children with language delays often struggle with specific grammatical structures.
• The "is interrogative" structure is a key component of question formation in English.
• Assessing the elicitation of specific syntactic structures is crucial for intervention.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the effectiveness of different language tasks in eliciting "is interrogative" utterances from language-delayed children.
• To identify task characteristics that facilitate the production of specific grammatical structures.
• To understand individual differences in response to language elicitation tasks.

Main Methods:

• Nine language-delayed children who previously failed an "is interrogative" test were studied.
• Six investigator-designed language tasks were used, varying in structure, context, and communicative intent.
• Syntactic performance was analyzed across tasks, from imitative to spontaneous language sampling.

Main Results:

• All nine subjects produced complete grammatical "is interrogative" utterances on at least one task.
• Tasks with communicative intention, contextual referents, and structure were most effective.
• Direct imitation was more effective than spontaneous sampling, but task effectiveness varied per child.

Conclusions:

• Language-delayed children can produce "is interrogative" structures with appropriate task design.
• Communicative intent and contextual support are key factors in eliciting target language structures.
• Individualized approaches are necessary, as task effectiveness varies among children.