A comparison of home and clinic gathered language samples

Language samples were gathered for 12 normal children representing a range of linguistic levels in a clinic setting with unstructured clinician-child interaction, and the home setting with unstructured mother-child interaction. Comparison of the samples revealed that children with an average utterance length four to five morphemes produced significantly longer utterances in the home setting. A comparison of frequency counts for various forms and construction types indicated the presence of syntactic preferences in each setting that could be traced to the nature of the underlying interaction. Clinic sampling was conducive to the description of ongoing or imminent activity, while home sampling stimulated substantially higher frequencies of past tense and modal verb forms, complex utterances, and questions. While there were frequency of occurrence differences between settings, the variety of forms and construction types was found to be similar. The results should be useful to clinicians as they interpret the significance of the presence, absence, or frequency of various syntactic structures in clinic language samples.