Language performance in naturalistic contexts can be characterized by general measures of productivity, fluency, lexical diversity, and grammatical complexity and accuracy. The use of such measures as indices of language impairment in older children is open to questions of method and interpretation. This study evaluated the extent to which 10 general language performance measures (GLPM) differentiated school-age children with language learning disabilities (LLD) from chronological-age (CA) and language-age (LA) peers. Children produced both spoken and written summaries of two educational videotapes that provided models of either narrative or expository (informational) discourse. Productivity measures, including total T-units, total words, and words per minute, were significantly lower for children with LLD than for CA children. Fluency (percent T-units with mazes) and lexical diversity (number of different words) measures were similar for all children. Grammatical complexity as measured by words per T-unit was significantly lower for LLD children. However, there was no difference among groups for clauses per T-unit. The only measure that distinguished children with LLD from both CA and LA peers was the extent of grammatical error. Effects of discourse genre and modality were consistent across groups. Compared to narratives, expository summaries were shorter, less fluent (spoken versions), more complex (words per T-unit), and more error prone. Written summaries were shorter and had more errors than spoken versions. For many LLD and LA children, expository writing was exceedingly difficult. Implications for accounts of language impairment in older children are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of verb and noun morphology in school-age children's spoken and written language. Sixty children, with and without language learning disabilities (LLD), each produced 2 spoken and 2 written language samples. The children's accuracy in using morphemes that mark verb finiteness (regular past tense, 3rd person singular present tense, copula, and auxiliary BE) was compared with their accuracy in using noun morphology (regular plural, possessive, articles). As would be expected, the typically achieving children, who were aged 7 to 12 years, had mastered the verb and noun morphology in spoken and written samples. The children with LLD, aged 10 to 12 years, also showed high accuracy in the spoken samples. On the other hand, they showed substantial difficulty in the written samples with the regular past tense, with errors in 26% of obligatory contexts. However, the children with LLD also had difficulty with the regular plural, with errors in 12% of obligatory contexts. For both the regular past tense and plural, all errors were errors of omission. These results indicate that finiteness marking remains an area of relative difficulty, but perhaps not the only grammatical difficulty, for children with language impairments in the school years.

Narrative language samples may complement norm-referenced tests well, but age combined with narrative task can be expected to influence the nature of the relationship.

Sentence complexity can create comprehension problems for struggling readers. The contribution of sentence comprehension to successful reading has been overlooked in models that emphasize domain-general comprehension strategies at the text level. The author calls for the evaluation of sentence comprehension within the context of content domains where complex sentences are found.

peech-language pathologists who work with school-age children and adolescents with language disorders face a special set of challenges when it comes to describing and interpreting syntactic ability in language performance data. There are few linguistic profiling systems or quantitative measures that have been applied widely to language samples of older children. This contrasts with relatively well-established procedures for determining the grammatical abilities of preschool children with suspected language disorders.Using quantitative measures such as mean length of utterance (MLU) and profiling syntactic structures at the word, phrase. and clause levels, the extent of developmental delay can be identified with some confidence. For instance, a clinician might determine that a 4-year-old uses language forms that are more characteristic of a 2-year-old. Such a comparison assumes that clinicians know how 2-year-olds talk and agree on quantitative and qualitative ways of describing language. But, could syntactic difficulties be determined as easily in an I l-year-old. or a 14-year-ABSTRACT: Syntactic measures developed for preschool children are insensitive to later-developing forms produced by older children. Information concerning syntax in school-age children and adolescents is available but has not yet emerged as a set of measures widely used by speech-language pathologists. This article identifies several sources of information about syntax from language samples (spoken and written) and from standardized language tests. Language samples yield information on sentence length, clause density, and use of higher level, discourse-motivated structures. Syntactic subtests from three standardized language tests for school-age children and adolescents are analyzed in order to determine structural content and processing format.